How I Made $4000 for 15 Minutes of Work Helping a Customer
I didn't ask for anything in return but my customer insisted on paying me a fee for my services even though they only took around 15 minutes total time to do. I told him he didn't have to but if he wanted to then just pay me what he felt was due.
He then proceeded to write me a check for $4000 which blew me away. I even told him no I couldn't take it... but he kept on insisting (he is from Nigeria and I think it would have been insulting if I didn't).
Let me give you a little background though on the deal and how it all went down... now to start off with, this has nothing to do with Internet Marketing at all - just how a little help to a customer can pay big rewards even when you don't expect them!
I've been in the construction biz for approximately 30 years in parts for off road heavy equipment. Being in this biz for this long allows me a lot of contacts for different types of parts / equipment even if it isn't in my Company's product lines.
Last year one of my long time customers from overseas contacted me (I've known him for around 25 years) and said he needed to make a deal on some Competitor equipment before the end of the year but he didn't know if he could do the deal. It was for some types of equipment that didn't match exactly what we sold at my company.
I told him I had a few contacts with the local authorized dealer and would help him in anyway possible to make the deal happen. Remember though I'm in parts and he was asking about equipment... but I felt I needed to help him so I told him to give me the details of the deal.
At this time it was the beginning of December and he needed the deal done by the end of December for his customers end of year budget in Nigeria. They do have the same type of competitor dealers in Africa but his customer didn't like the local dealer over their and was asking my customer for help even though he was not an authorized dealer for this type of equipment and neither am I.
So I told him to first see if he could get all the information he could get about the deal like the total package price quoted along with the individual pieces of equipment prices. Once he did this I told him to figure in his fees along with the transportation costs to ship them over. That way he could pinpoint the exact pricing he needed to negotiate with this dealer to get the deal.
Once he had those figures I would put him in touch with someone here that I could trust to get the deal done. I then made one phone call (about 15 minutes) to someone I've been dealing with for about the same amount of years in the business at this dealer and asked him who the most trust worthy salesperson was he felt comfortable with presenting this deal to.
He gave me the name of the salesman and I passed that onto my customer and told him what to say and how to make sure the salesman would work with him to make this happen.
And in less then a few weeks they had all the details hashed out and had the equipment at the port ready to ship before the end of December!
A few months after that he was back in the US and stopped by and that is when he thanked me and insisted on writing me that check. I also sent part of this to my contact at the dealership as my thank you to him for helping also which he was also blown away with the payment from my customer.
So you can see with this story... even though I wasn't a dealer for this equipment, even though my customer wasn't a dealer for this equipment, and even though nobody had to go out of the way to make this deal happen as the customer in Nigeria had a authorized dealer not too far from them but didn't like their service... we all worked together to make this happen and didn't expect anything out of it.
BUT... we all profited from this one deal by just lending a hand even IF it was just one phone call and a little wisdom on how to make the deal work.
SO... if you have a customer that has a problem and needs a solution that you may not be able to directly help with don't be afraid to send him to a competitor (I hate this term anyway as they can be your customers too) as it may just pay off in the long one.
If you have a similar experience please post it here for all of us to read...
Regards,
TedK
Roger Davis
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