Recently, the board of directors of the trade association I founded (Yellow-Tie International) was faced with a dilemma. We had a wonderful idea to customize our member's name tags by letting each member put his or her company logo on his or her tag.
This way, members could wear their name tags everywhere, instead of at only Yellow-Tie events. Problem was, our vendor simply couldn't customize every single tag without quadrupling the cost.
We resolved the issue by doing some quick math and learning that a minor up-front investment of $2,000 in some equipment would allow us to print the tags ourselves -- giving our members the customized tags they want, while actually saving us a lot of money in the long run (500 customized tags for $2,000 instead of 500 basic tags for $5,000).
So I went I-shopping and found a name tag printer that was perfect for our needs -- they had a great printer at a great packaged price that included almost everything we needed to print 500 tags.
I say almost, because in the very last step of the buying process the sales guy (he is an independent rep, not an employee of the company that manufactured the printer) asked me whether I wanted to buy the USB cable I'd need to connect the printer to my computer.
Let me see. Would I rather actually print name tags or am I more interested in purchasing a $2,000 paper weight?
Yes, I bought the printer and the $8.95 cable I needed to make it work. But no matter how much I love the printer, no one will ever hear how great it is, because I refuse to promote any manufacturer this boneheaded. (Note: I'm not faulting the sales guy. In fact, he and I were laughing about their attitude the whole time.)
Imagine the lost opportunity cost of that decision. As Yellow-Tie provides customized name tags to its next 500 members -- most of them business owners with large networks -- not a single one will ever hear how great the printer is. (I even chose to withhold the company name here just so they wouldn't get any positive exposure at all.)
Gill E. Wagner, Sage of Selling
President of Honest Selling
Founder of the Yellow-Tie International Business Development Association
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