The Friel World :: John Friel

Published:4/1/2008

One of the better hort seminar presenters I’ve heard recently was a guy who sells bicycles. You read that right: He peddles pedals, not petals.

Chris Zane, keynote speaker at New England Grows, is 42 years old. He’s been selling bikes for 25 years. The one-boy shop he started in his teens now grosses $12 million a year.

Zane trains his sales staff to focus on each customer’s lifetime value, not their one-time revenue potential. A customer is someone to build a relationship with, to entice and woo, someone worth, over the years, around $5,000. Sell a young person a bike, he reasons, treat them right, and they’ll be back—for a better bike, a bike for their spouse, bikes for their kids, tires, accessories, repairs, clothing, helmets, yada yada. And whatever keeps him in your store and out of your competitor’s, you do.

Zane’s offers lifetime guarantees, lifetime free service, and inexpensive flat tire insurance. That sounds like extreme exposure, but they won’t sell products they can’t trust, and they’ve done the math: Fewer than 20% of customers ever avail themselves of the freebies. “Most people don’t use their bikes,” Chris says. “They’re garage art.”

Besides the advertised big bennies, they do little things routinely. For a minor problem that’s cheap and easy to solve, there’s no charge. If a guy brings in a “defective” inner tube, he gets a smile, a new tube, and no argument—even though both parties know he poked a screwdriver through it while installing it.

Remember, this is no little corner store. Their computer tracks purchases obsessively, so customers never need receipts. Buy a baby seat for your bike, and a couple of years later—surprise! Here’s a flyer for a training-wheel bike sale. And so on.

Zane’s mantra—service first, service always—and his policy of giving away small stuff rather than waste good vibes ringing it up, struck a chord, or perhaps a nerve. People remember that kind of personal touch fondly. We remember the other kind, when a retailer or wholesaler treated them like a cash cow, a nuisance, or both, un-fondly.

My all-time favorite is the $8 screw—as in stainless-steel sheet metal screw. Years ago, I took a company minivan to the dealer for routine service. I noticed a screw missing from the tailgate, leaving some chrome loose, so I asked them to replace that, too.

When I picked up the van, on the bill with the expected charges was an unexpected $8 for replacing that one lousy screw. I politely opined that this was perhaps excessive for anyone but NASA. The manager expounded at length, with a condescending air, upon the dealership’s SOP. Any individual thing done to any car is a separate job with hourly labor and parts charges. Mechanics punch in, do the deed, and punch out, repeatedly.

So apparently my guy (a) clocked in; (b) read the work order, small print included; (c) located the tailgate; (d) identified the missing part; (e) strolled to the parts department for a replacement; (f) exchanged pleasantries with the counter person; (g) returned to the van; (h) selected the appropriate tool; (i) screwed in the screw; and (j) clocked out.

Had I suspected anyone would charge so much for so little, I’d have (a) lived with the loose chrome; (b) fixed it myself; or (c) gone to an independent garage, knowing that if they’d charged anything for that screw, it would be cents, not dollars.

Despite my protests, the manager stood firm. Said he had no choice. The dealership got its $8. Care to guess how much of our business they got thereafter? If you guessed $0, you’re right on the money. He did have a choice, of course; we almost always do. His was to sell all our potential future invoices for $8. The independent down the street has a stack of them.

So that’s my $8 screw. I’ve spared you the obvious jokes, which my editor would delete anyway. My point is, of course, Zane’s point: Small generosities can pay huge dividends. Confrontational pettifogging can screw up a relationship. Customers are touchy—just like us.

John Friel is marketing manager for Yoder Brothers Green Leaf Perennials. He is also a freelance writer.