We’ve talked about sacrificing your price and time to close a deal…but what about sacrificing what you offer? What about diminishing the value of your service or product to a close a deal?

Typically this would be done in response to another sacrifice. You’ve given the customer a crazy price or you’ve agreed to an impossible timeline…now what? Or, perhaps you’re already stretched too thin but you don’t want to turn down business…

Do you cut corners with your service or product?

No.

Start lowering the quality of what you offer and your customers will notice. They don’t care that they got what you’re selling at a super-low price, or that they wanted it “yesterday”, they’ll expect and demand your best effort. Clients rarely believe in, “You get what you pay for.” If a customer gets less than expected they’ll tell other people; and that’s going to damage your business irrevocably.

It’s fairly easy in a lot of cases to cut corners with your service or product. Maybe you get a junior person to do the work instead of your more expensive senior person. Or maybe you offer less responsive customer support to a client that bought your product for super-cheap. There’s plenty of ways to cut corners and lots of business do it.

I’ve done it.

Truth be told, I’ve gotten away with it too, but not always. So it may be tempting to cut corners, but in the long run it’s not worth it. And it exemplifies how important it is to be very cautious about sacrificing price or time because it leads to other, potentially serious problems.