Embrace Your Mistakes - They Are Lessons in Disguise
By Chris Kilian   ©2004 All Rights Reserved

What do you do when you are confronted by disgruntled buyers of your goods and services?

Ignore it? Get angry? Fix it? You already know what the RIGHT answer is, don't you? You must take immediate steps to fix it. What next? Learn from the incident. I recently had the occasion to be confronted on some guaranteed traffic I sold to a person. I had promised a certain number of hits for a certain price. The targeted URL DID get the hits promised, actually a few more than promised, but some weeks later, I got an email which was not very complimentary of what had been delivered. What to do? What to do? I could have ignored it. I could have considered the reaction I got as simply "sour grapes." But if you leave enough sour grapes lying around on the net, sooner or later, your site will have an smell that will hurt your business. I could have reacted in anger. After all, I sold and delivered EXACTLY what I promised. What more could I do? If this person bought expecting a result they did not get, is that my fault or theirs? Am I to act as guardian for everyone who buys from me? Do I need to send out a questionnaire on why someone is buying, or do I simply deliver what is ordered? My job is provide what I promise, not rationalize whether the reason for the purchase makes sense. What I did was examine the complaint. Were there places in my sales copy where I was misleading? Did I leave out information that might have caused this ill-fated purchase? I looked at the sale from my customer's viewpoint to find errors in my presentation, and fixed it. I also wrote back to this person with my explanation of what I thought I was communicating in my previous message and to inform them of a complete refund of their money. "You mean you sold something. Someone benefited from it, and you still sent back their money?" Yep. Life is too short as it is. It doesn't improve if you hold onto every penny you come across. Besides, that complaint DID make me change the approach I had been taking to sell guaranteed traffic, and the process I went through probably improved my offer and the satisfaction of future buyers, and that was worth more than this one sale. So, the next time you get hammered for something you have sold, don't ignore it. Don't get angry. Fix it, and learn from it. Both you and your customers, the complainer and those customers to come, will be better off for your efforts. I hope this helps you in your marketing efforts. You may use the article in your ezine, on your site, or in your ebook, so long as you keep the write credit below.

offers traffic from two different web sites: http://www.winitlotto.com and http://www.twodollarads.com Chris also sends out a weekly ezine, Secrets for Success which you can get delivered free with your email to: secretsforsuccess@postmaster-email.com

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