How Clients Buy

Chapter 3Beyond PixelsSelling a Service Is Different from Selling Things (and Harder, too)

Selling high-end expert services is different from selling ice cream or iPads.

Economists call consulting and professional services “credence goods.” Asher Wolinsky, a microeconomics professor at Northwestern University, puts it this way:

The term credence good refers to goods and services whose sellers are also experts who determine the customers' needs. This feature is shared by medical and legal services and a wide variety of business services. In such markets, even when the success of performing the service is observable, customers often cannot determine the extent of the service that was needed and how much was actually performed.

We all know the feeling. You drop off your laptop at the repair shop in the mall because you woke up on Monday morning to the blue screen of death. There is a nice guy there whose job it is to wrangle customers. He tells you he will call you later once they look under the hood. You suspect he was hired because he is a smooth talker and not because he really knows anything about computers. It feels like his job is to keep you away from the tech guys.

He calls you mid-morning.

“We took a look at your laptop. Your memory board is most likely fried. We're going to run a diagnostic test and that will help us better understand what is going on, but I wanted to warn you that it might require a new memory board.”

You search for the right way to respond. “It's ...