Do You Always Have To Say Yes To The Customer?
Do your customers ask you for things that you can’t or won’t do? When you can’t give them what they ask for, how do you say No without antagonizing them? Should you always just say Yes? Or, is there another way to handle the situations when you can’t say Yes, but still want to please the customers?
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– Do you always have to say yes to the customer? Listen to this episode and find out. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Wedding Business Solutions podcast. I’m Alan Berg, and this topic comes out of a conversation that I had this week twice with customers where I was doing sales training. Do you always have to say yes to the customer? Is it okay to say no to the customer? Well, there are different parts of this. There’s the sales process, where it’s perfectly fine to say no, because not every customer is the right fit. You don’t want to do every wedding, do every event, and if you’re in another kind of a line of business or have another business that parallels it, you don’t always have to say yes because sometimes you’re not the right fit. I can remember turning down what would, to this day, still have been the highest paying speaking gig, training gig that I would’ve had, and I turned it down because I wasn’t the right guy. They wanted me because they had seen me, heard me, read books and so forth, but what they were asking me to do wasn’t something that I consider myself an expert on, and therefore I’m supposed to say no. I’m not supposed to learn how to do this on the dime of a customer who’s paying me to be an expert if I’m not already the expert.
My personal definition of a expert speaker, or a speaker-expert, right, could be both of those, is someone who can continue the conversation off stage that they started on stage without the need for notes and slides et cetera, because if you’re truly an expert, you shouldn’t need any of that. Right, I don’t need them on stage; I use them because it’s a better experience for an audience when there are visuals. It keeps things moving, you know what we’re talking about now and next and so forth, but if you can only talk about your topic on stage with notes, you’re not necessarily really an expert. Years and years ago, back when, my days when I was at The Knot, I was Vice President of Sales, and I could talk about business onstage, offstage, all day long, that’s my expertise. Once in a while, they would send me to an event and have me speak about the latest colors or trends because the editor couldn’t make it or whatever it was and we were only having one person at that event, and that’s not my expertise, I resisted that, and sometimes I had to do it, and I would say, here, these are the latest out of our study, this is, I’m going to give you a link to the full study if you want more information about that, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to our editors. Not to me, because I’m not the expert on that, so there, I was basically reciting somebody else’s information.
But let’s go to not the sales part, let’s go to either in the sale or after the sale, but before their event or maybe even at their event. Do you always have to say yes? And the answer is that you should always try to say yes, because no customer wants to hear no. You don’t like to hear a no, I don’t like to hear a no. You didn’t like it when you’re five years old, you’re not going to like it when you’re 35 or 45 or 55 or 65. You don’t want to hear a no. And the thing is you can’t always give them the yes that they want, but the key is to try to give them a yes. Try to give them a solution because customers are going to ask for things that they know or think can be done, they’re not going to ask for things that they’re not aware of. So sometimes a customer can say, can you do this? And the answer is no, you can’t, and there might be a very good reason why not, and you can explain to the customer why not, which is really important because you do want to explain to customers why not. You don’t want to just say no, you want to explain why not and then provide them with an alternative solution, an alternative yes.
So there are some really good reasons why you can’t have fireworks at a lot of venues, right? You don’t want to start a forest fire, right? We don’t want to be the one that created that fire that just scorched tens of thousands of acres. So if you’re not allowed legally to do that, instead of saying, you know what, can’t do fireworks, sorry, you can say, well, we can’t do fireworks because of fire code, but what is it about fireworks that was interesting to you? And they might say, well, we just wanted a wow factor at the end of our wedding for our guests. Well, there’s a lot of other things you can do to wow the guests. You could do a sparkler exit if that’s allowed, you could do fiber-optic exit if that’s allowed. Why don’t you bring in the trucks that they bring to movie theaters when they’re opening up on a premiere and they have those lights lighting up in the sky? What if you do something like that, you know, like the Bat Symbol? Maybe have your monogram up in the sky, I don’t know. Just thinking about things like that.
What can you do to provide a wow? Lots of things. The why was the wow, the why it wasn’t the fireworks. So sometimes asking a question is going to be a better way to handle that. I mentioned this on another episode, but there was an article in forbes.com by Micah Solomon, and he said best way to handle customers is this. “The answer is yes. Now what was the question?” Now, if you have ever experienced real five-star service, right, I mean a real five-star hotel, five-star restaurant, the service there is different, right? There isn’t, no should not be in their vocabulary. I was with a client just recently and I was relating to their sales team that I had read in a book about someone who went into a restaurant, little cafe. Sat down, going to order, the waitstaff came over and said, “What would you like to drink?” And they said, “I’d like a Coca-Cola.” And they said, “Well, we serve Pepsi products. Is that okay?” They said, “No, I’m really not crazy about Pepsi, but just gimme some water.” And they ordered their meal, and about 15 minutes later, a Coca-Cola showed up. And they said to the waiter, “I thought you don’t carry Coca-Cola.” He said, “We don’t, but I sent my manager to get you one.” And the manager went out, went to a convenience store or whatever, and brought back a Coca-Cola.
Well, I’m mentioning this, and my client said they were out to dinner the other night with, it was he and his wife, and he asked for a certain type of a beer and they didn’t have it, so he ordered a different one, and then a little bit later, the beer that he originally ordered showed up, and it was exactly that same thing. He said, “Well, I thought you don’t carry that.” He said, “I don’t, but I mentioned to my manager that you asked for something that we don’t carry and they went and got it.” Now there’s a few parts to that. One is they might have read that other book. I can’t remember what book it was at this point, but they might have read it as well. The other is the communication where the waiter said to the manager, “Somebody ordered something we don’t carry.” Now, was that the waiter taking it upon themselves, or was that the company saying you need to tell us when people ask for things we don’t carry because there are opportunities there. One way or another, that was a really good situation. Besides the fact that the right beer showed up, it was a really good situation because of the communication.
I remember being at a jewelry store and I said to them, “Do you keep track of the things that people ask for that you don’t carry?” And they said, “Well, we used to.” I said, “Well, why don’t you anymore?” He goes, “I don’t know, we just stopped.” So just think about this. In a jewelry store, you say to someone, hi, I need a pink elephant charm for a charm bracelet, and they’re like, we don’t have any pink elephant charms, but we can get you one, it’ll take a couple of weeks or whatever, like no, no, no, okay, and they look for something else, or maybe they leave. What if each of the three or four staff members gets asked once that day for a pink elephant charm? To each of them, it was once, no big deal, but to the store, it was four times or five times, and there’s a pattern. Now, maybe we should be stocking pink elephant charms. First of all we want to be able to say yes to the customer, but we also want to be looking for some of these patterns. Is there a really good reason why you would say no to this customer for this particular thing?
A very common thing that I hear with my clients is many, if not most, probably should be all, wedding venues and event venues don’t do shots, and a lot of them don’t do neat drinks for the same reason, because that’s like a shot, it’s just nothing in there, and they don’t do just on the rocks. There has to be water, soda, mixer, something into the alcohol, can’t just be that. Now we know in the industry, that’s a really good thing because bad things happen the more people are drinking straight alcohol, right? So how do you say no? What is the answer to that? And you know what, it should be no. It should be no. Your friends and family don’t come to your wedding to get drunk. They come to your wedding to celebrate the fact that you got married. And you want to serve them food they like to eat, drinks they like to drink and so forth, but you don’t need to facilitate them getting drunk. One of my clients the other day said, customer said, “All right, what do we have to do to have a nine-hour open bar?” And they said, “After about four hours, bad things usually start to happen. Nine hours of open bar?” So again, don’t necessarily say no, don’t necessarily say yes, but ask why.
So what is it about that? What is it that made you ask that question? Nine-hour open bar is pretty unusual thing. Nine hours in general, what is the issue over there? So get to the why, and then provide them with a solution. And if there’s a no, if there’s a hard no, well there’s usually a reason for a hard no. If there isn’t a reason for the hard no other than we’ve always said no, if it’s not illegal, if it’s not dangerous, should it be a no? Can we say yes? And I think rules, there have to be black and white rules because there are legality and insurance issues and things like that, and then a lot of the other stuff just became rules because we’ve always done that or it’s outside of our normal thing. And if it’s outside of our normal thing, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it unless it disrupts other events, other things that we’re doing, that might be an issue. But a lot of times, like a customer wants to come in an hour early for an event? Well, if there’s a charge, you can say to them, absolutely, you can come in an hour early, and it’s only going to be, you know, $500 more. And if they say, well, you guys are here already, right, but we have to have staff that’s there for you, and we have to now open an hour earlier, we have to come an hour earlier as well, so we’re paying staffing and we’re turning the lights on and so forth, and it’s only $500 towards your many, many, many thousands of dollar event if you’re a venue. Would you like to come in an hour early? It’s their wallet, not yours.
I just saw on Facebook before I started recording this with someone who said they got an inquiry and somebody said that they were on a budget, and they ended up spending the price that this particular entertainment company charges, which is not a low price, because that customer’s idea of budget and your idea of budget were different. There’s that whole kind of hitting the reset button I mentioned on another episode. So do you always have to say yes? No you do not. Should you always try to say yes? Yes you should. Is it the yes the customer asked for? Very often no, but it is a yes, because we want to hear yeses, and it’s more fun to say yes, and it’s more fun to give the customer solutions, especially ones that they didn’t even think about. So if you’re into books, read “The Challenger Sale”. I forget who it’s by, sorry; it’s a red cover. Challenge them on their assumptions and the results that they want, and provide them with even better ones so that your no is really a yes that’s better than they asked for. I hope this gives you something to think about. Thanks for listening.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
Listen to this and all episodes on Apple Podcast, YouTube or your favorite app/site:
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- YouTube: www.WeddingBusinessSolutionsPodcast.tv
- Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3sGsuB8
- Stitcher:
- Google Podcast:
- iHeart Radio: https://ihr.fm/31C9Mic
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