Got first salon client today...but took a different turn

Thought I would share this experience today, because this went in a totally different direction than I expected...

I had a 2nd meeting with a salon today (2 locations) to talk about how they could use appointment reminders to help their business. The marketing person, the owner, and the admin girl was at the meeting. My mind was set on fixing them up with a texting solution that would primarily be used to help them remind clients of appts.

As I started showing them the reminder platform that I had custom made (using Twilio), the marketing person was very negative on the idea, because she said their mission statement was to keep everything "personal" to their clients. So she felt that calling them on the phone to remind clients was more inline with their mission. She felt that picking up the phone to call them was just as easy as sending a text, and more "personal". The owner agreed. Yikes!

This meeting was quickly going south, until.....

they expressed interest in using texting as a marketing tool. So... I quickly changed gears and described to them how I set up a local pizza place (using an OpenVBX flow) to build a list of mobile subscribers by either texting a keyword or just calling the local number. I explained how messages could be sent directly from the marketing person's cell phone to the entire list, and offered some examples of ways to use it for their salon.

To make a long story short, they loved the idea and agreed to get started with my 30 day free trial.

So I went home, exported my existing pizza flow, changed some things, then assigned a local phone number to the flow, and within a few minutes had another text/voice system for another niche working perfectly.

Moral of the story is....be flexible, and ask questions, because you never really know what a business really wants until they tell you. You might go in with what you think they need, but in reality they WANT something else.

Also, whatever you offer, make it look like you are designing a "custom solution" just for them and then help them implement it to be successful. That will distance you from ANY competition. Then simply rinse and repeat.