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Inhibitors and Tick-Off Factors

Have you been to those websites? You know the ones. They tout products to be purchased over the web, including the latest electronics, computers, cameras or CDs. You drool over the descriptions and finally settle on a great new gizmo that you simply cannot live without. You head to the ordering page, Visa in hand, only to be confronted with the line "CALL FOR PRICING".

Suddenly a simple transaction has turned into a complicated one. You need to call a phone number, probably wait on hold for ten minutes. You will then need to talk to a salesman who will most likely ask you to give him a competitor's price before revealing his price. Thinking this over, you remember that it will take a full week for the product to arrive and that maybe the price at Best Buy wasn't so bad after all. You log off and head out to the store where you can have that toy today.

You have just run into something called a purchase inhibitor. Simply put, a purchase inhibitor is anything that will keep a customer from making the purchase. We encounter inhibitors every day. The price is more than we want to spend. The bills were too high this month. The store is all the way across town. The salesman smells of old cigars. The new product is incompatible with our existing system. The installation looks too complicated. We can't get the salesman's attention. We can't find parking. The list goes on and on.

Lets take a moment to look at something different. My neighbor Fred recently bought a new television set from CHEAPCO, a local discount store. He got it home and discovered that it wouldn't work. He packed it back up and took it back only to be told that the store did not have a service department and would not exchange the unit. Fred was forced to take the set to a repair center fifty miles away and wait six weeks before he was able to use his brand new television. Now Fred has his TV, and the store has its money, but when Fred is ready to buy that new amplifier, there is absolutely no chance that CHEAPCO will get the sale. Worse, Fred has told all the neighbors how he got ripped off at CHEAPCO, which probably lost them several other sales as well. I call this a piss-off factor. The store has its sale, but it handled it so poorly that it lost several potential sales.

Sometimes an inhibitor can also be a piss-off factor. I recently visited a local electronics chain. I needed a $3 switch and the store was convenient. I found the switch and handed the clerk a $5 bill. He then proceeded to ask me for my phone number. I politely declined as I didn't want to get back on their catalog list and was told that the new software would not allow a cash sale without the phone number. I retrieved my $5 and left without the switch. Not only did they lose the sale, but since I now know the policy, it will be a while before I go back to that chain.

Occasionally an existing policy can become an inhibitor or piss-off factor. This is because something in society changes, which in turn, forces a change in how we need to do business. A good example is the rise of Sunday shopping. As late as 1970, many businesses were conducted on a strict five day week. This was considered the norm. However, in the 70s, the discount superstore emerged. Among other traits, it offered evening and Sunday shopping. Working parents took to the idea like wildfire, and soon the mom and pop stores found that they needed to adapt or go under. The lack of weekend hours became an inhibitor, and the way things had always been done was no longer sufficient.

It's impossible to totally avoid inhibitors. For example, I lust over a new house being built. It has exactly the rooms and space I dream of. The lot is large and provides a protected view of the mountains. It is absolutely perfect. However, the $1.5 million price tag is a serious inhibitor. There is no way that the builder could lower the price to what I can afford. Even if the price were $1,000, it would be an inhibitor for some people. Thus price is always an inhibitor. Likewise location will likely be an inhibitor for some customers. Your competitor will be closer to some customers than you are.

It is impossible to avoid piss-off factors for all customers. Some customers will object to providing identification when presenting a check. However, this is a reasonable precaution and the industry norm. Since we can't avoid the factors entirely, we need to figure out how to mitigate them as much as possible.

Look carefully at your business. What will keep a customer from coming in to your store? Once there, are there factors which will prevent an eager customer from closing the sale? What are the factors which will cause customer dissatisfaction after the sale which will prevent repeat business? Be honest with yourself and look hard.

Become the customer for a minute. A lot of these inhibitors may be quite subtle. I ran into an example just today. We were at The Disney Store and we observed a customer attempting to buy a watch. The watches were in a locked case. The key to the case was behind the counter and the sales clerk was able to show and demonstrate the watches. So far, so good. However, after the customer made her selection, it turned out that only the manager had the key to the storeroom where the watches were kept. The clerks spent five minutes trying to locate the manager who had gone to lunch. The customer finally gave up and left, taking a $100 sale with her.

Now, it probably seemed like a good idea to limit access to the storeroom where the watches were stored to only the most trusted employee. There likely is a high turnover and possibly employee theft is a problem. However, the point is that this policy does not benefit the customer because it sometimes prevents the completion of the sale. You as the owner need to devise a method of ensuring that your stock is available under all conditions. This may mean trusting an assistant manager and ensuring that one or the other is on the floor at all times. It may simply mean replacing the key lock with card access where you can determine who accessed the room at a particular time.

Information gathering deserves special mention. Many companies and smaller businesses now try to gather information on their customers. The problem is that many potential customers feel this is an invasion of privacy. If done poorly, this can be a major piss-off factor for a significant number of customers. At worst, it can even be viewed as a matter of distrust which will strongly alienate your customer.

Before embarking on an information gathering campaign, you need to ask yourself two important questions. First, do you know what you hope to accomplish? If you don't know, ask yourself why you are risking goodwill to collect the data. If it is just for a mailing list, could you accomplish this in other ways? Checks contain all the information you need for this purpose. Credit card companies will sell you the information for a small fee. In both cases, the costs will likely be less than the lost revenue over the piss-off factor.

In summary, they key is to look at policies and see whether they benefit you more than the customer. If not, you need to see whether the policy costs more in lost business than it generates. If this is the case, you need to constantly look for ways of being less intrusive and to accomplish your goals while not jeopardizing the sale.