Why is it so easy to find negative examples of marketing?

Several years ago my wife Jana and I needed to redo some floors in our house.

A local flooring store had an offer that was hard not to resist: 0 percent financing for a year.

While Jana and I are not prone to buy on credit, the offer piqued our interest. We visited the store, picked up some samples, and, finally, had some folks from the store out to measure our floors. We got the quote by email, choked a bit at the price, and then promptly delayed making a decision.

Several days passed. Then a week. We liked the folks at the store; the woman was warm, helpful. We thought about getting a second quote from a competitor, but delayed doing so.

The salesperson, though, never followed up after she emailed us the quote. No call. No email.

Finally, after a couple weeks, Jana and I finally said, “Well, are we going to do this or not?”

It made good sense to visit another flooring store and get another quote. We took (ergo, wasted) a perfectly good Saturday afternoon and visited a competitor that had no credit promotion. We had the measurements from the first flooring store, so on the spot the salesperson gave us a quote, for $1000 less, for the same flooring.

We wrote a check that afternoon. And saved $1000.

I hate to admit this: I probably would have paid $1000 more if the salesperson at the first store had simply followed up. All I needed was a nudge. I wanted to be sold to.

So what’s the relationship between marketing (the 0 percent financing offer) and sales (our signing the deal for $1,000 less at the second store)?

A phone call.

If you’re in the service industry (university enrollment, donor development, professional services, etc), and no one is paying attention to the relationship between marketing and “sales,” you may be missing out on picking off the low-hanging fruit.