Do customers even listen?

As marketers and salespeople, we all carefully craft our message to highlight features of a product, as well as to explain what it doesn’t do. Of course we are heavy on the former and light on the latter. But since we’ve provided a detailed, accurate description, the customer is well informed, right? Wrong. They only hear what they want to hear–here are two cases:

1. A new customer wanted to order two of our units that we promote as ‘in stock’. The proposal states that we allow a few days for shipment. When he talked to our salesperson, he was told that the equipment would ship ‘early next week’. His PO was in Friday after close of business, and by Monday afternoon he had sent an email complaining it hadn’t shipped yet and doubting that we really had the equipment in stock. Sheesh.

2. One of our customers ‘called us on the carpet’ because the standard equipment we sold was missing a feature called out on our proposal. He was right, this feature is only included with its sister product. What’s truly embarrassing is that we’ve been calling out this feature for over four years without anyone else noticing. I can only guess that this feature isn’t important to the people buying this equipment, so they didn’t check or care.