Everyone knows the MasterCard commercial format:
“Two tickets: $28.
Two hot dogs, two popcorns, two sodas: $18.
One autographed baseball: $45.
Real conversation with 11-year-old son: Priceless.
There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
Indeed, the things we value most are the things money cannot buy: family, love, respect, health, happiness, integrity, trust.
Matchmaker has worked with a customer on inbound freight for the past 20 years; we have built a strong relationship with our customer built on honesty, integrity, and trust. Although we were fortunate to serve our customer’s inbound needs, we had never been able to break into servicing their outbound accounts because our competitors were beating us on price.
But this week, that changed. Our pricing didn’t get any lower, but we had something our competitors didn’t–our customer’s trust. The lower-priced competitor couldn’t be trusted to communicate when loads weren’t covered or provide status updates when they were. Our customer realized that the amount of time, worry, and hassle they were spending on checking up with the low-priced competitor wasn’t worth the cost savings. Paying a little bit more for peace of mind with a dependable and trustworthy broker made a lot more sense. In fact, it was priceless.
A New York Times/CBS News poll from July 1999 revealed that 63% of people interviewed believe that in dealing with “most people” you “can’t be too careful” and 37% believed that “most people would try to take advantage of you if they got the chance”. In the same study respondents revealed that of the people that they “know personally,” they would expect 85% of them to “try to be fair.” I think the study can be best be summed up in these words: “Trust. Once you get it, it’s priceless, but once you lose it, you are useless.” Our sales approach based on relationship building may take longer (in this case, 20 years!), but we think it’s well worth it.
Here are some of my favorite quotes about trust:
•Trust, but verify. ~Ronald Reagan
•As for butter versus margarine, I trust cows more than chemists. ~Joan Gussow
•I think we may safely trust a good deal more than we do. ~Henry David Thoreau
•Deciding whether or not to trust a person is like deciding whether or not to climb a tree, because you might get a wonderful view from the highest branch, or you might simply get covered in sap, and for this reason many people choose to spend their time alone and indoors, where it is harder to get a splinter. ~Lemony Snicket
Go out on a limb this weekend,
~Bob
