An Invaluable Lesson on Customer Acquisition I Learned From a Seat Cover Guy – No Joke

My name is John Kimble Ali  and I love my car.

They say, customer retention is easier than customer acquisition; but obviously you will have to get some customers first.

I never thought I will learn one of my most precious lessons about customer acquisition from a smalltime seat cover guy.

An invaluable lesson on Customer Acquisition

Last week, a friend (who has a monstrous, fat ass) took my car for a long journey. When it came back, I noticed the driver’s seat cover had been thrashed out of its place. Obviously, it could not stand the inhumane ‘butt force’ applied at God knows which angles.

What a gift!

I become too fussy when something, no matter how minor, happens to my car and I can’t relax until I get it fixed. So the very next morning, I drove to the closest auto market, nearly 7 miles away. 

I stopped at the first shop and the guy asked me to wait for a while before he could finish cutting some weird shapes. And after that, he totally forgot that I was standing there. I had enough of waiting after standing there for 10 minutes and stormed out without saying a word.

Then went to another shop but the gentleman told me that they are too busy due to the upcoming Eid Holidays and could only help me after thirty minutes. I didn’t have enough time to wait for half an hour for something that will only take five minutes.

I got agitated and planned to return home.

But then I came across another shop. I went in, told the shopkeeper what I wanted, straightaway he sent one of his assistants who did the job in just a few minutes. I paid him and was about to leave when he said something that taught me a lot about customer acquisition:

“Sir, we are having a very busy schedule due to Eid. But I did not want you to leave – I don’t want to lose any new customer just because of work overload.

We can always request our repeat customers to wait a little extra and they would happily accept our request because they are satisfied with our work. But I know, new customers are rickety; they will simply leave if we ask them to hold their fire.”

Wow! I never thought this way.

When I started my freelance writing career (on a bidding site), I was always swamped in work and had to refuse a lot of lucrative proposals.

 But then came the time when my repeat customers did not have any job for a quite a while and I found customer acquisition pretty hard. So I had to spend several days without any job.

Don’t lose new costumers only because you are inundated with work; try to manage.

But it would be worse if you bite more than you can chew!

What do you have to say about customer acquisition, share it in the comments.

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