Aug 1, 2005 By:
Jim Anderson Pest Management Professional
Jim Anderson
While attending a recent seminar, I heard two speakers emphasize the idea of "underpromise and overdeliver." It really
sounded like a good idea at the time. Conversely, who would ever want to purposely overpromise and underdeliver?
Don't get me wrong. We do need to be more realistic about what we promise. We also need to constantly improve the quality of the services we provide.
I'm just not sure that this philosophy helps accomplish either of those things.
Let's begin with the underpromise part. We all know that our competition makes some pretty big promises out there. Do we really
want our salespeople to tell prospective customers, "We can't really promise to do all of those things the other companies
have promised you. But you can depend on us to charge you just as much or more — and maybe you'll be in for a pleasant surprise
or two along the way"?
Underpromising infers that we can actually lower our customer's expectations so that the overdelivering part is much easier. Maybe if we were the only pest management company
for them to choose from, we could lower their expectations a little by telling them that our program is the best that can
be done for them in their situation. They would be forced to accept it. But just try selling that approach to someone who
has just spent two hours on the Internet looking at all the options available. No, that certainly won't work in our market.
If we find it difficult or impossible to lower our customers' expectations in the real world, then overdelivering also becomes
a really big problem. Most of our customers have zero tolerance for the pest problems they have. That means that you don't
have to be perfect — you have to be better than perfect to exceed their expectations. Do your managers really want to tell
your technicians that zero pest activity is not good enough — they have to somehow produce negative pest activity to deliver
service that exceeds their customers' expectations?
I guess we will just have to continue to discover our customer's true expectations the old-fashioned way (by asking) and then
meet those expectations with professionalism and a smile. It isn't very trendy, but it works.
Anderson is a technical trainer with Smithereen Pest Management Services, Evanston, Ill. Contact him at pccontributor@questex.com .
