Modelo de Organizativo para una Factoría de Pruebas

Every week we get emails from people saying how completely frustrated they are about their businesses. They say they are doing everything right and that they just

cannot understand why they aren’t busier. They complain that the particular competitor they have down the road seems to be far busier and yet, in their eyes, doesn’t do as good a job.

It is frustrating but the fact is that the difference between a profitable business and a non-profitable business is generally the result of nothing to do with location or a bad business plan or some of those other factors that we might read about in a book. The difference is that the successful guys have managed to master two key skills.

Those skills are the ability to create desire and trust. That’s it.

We all have various daft things that we spend money on – almost regardless of whether we can afford it or not. In Western society nearly all our purchasing decisions are driven by emotion and therefore there is always a choice. We choose to buy one thing over another for all sorts of reasons, most of which

bear no relation to why we say we buy them. We buy certain types of wine, shoes, golf clubs, chocolate, magazines, newspapers, clothes, cars, computers – all based on a priority that we have in our mind. And most of the time these priorities are driven by desire and trust.

Ask an Apple Mac user to go back to a PC and he’ll smirk in an infuriatingly smug way – it’ll never happen. The Apple Ipod is clearly not the best MP3 player but the desirability quotient is through the roof. You can buy a comparable PC for about a third of the price of a Mac and that doesn’t make the slightest difference. Apple has huge trust built up with their customers too. Just walk into your local Apple store to see both concepts in action. Desire is clearly there and it exhibits a lifestyle that we all aspire to, but also they have cleverly crafted all manner of inexpensive ways to help you out with your Apple products. You know that if something goes wrong there is an aspirational geek just waiting to answer your questions in a pleasant and highly trained manner. So your trust that ‘everything will be all right’ is huge and coupled with the desirability quotient it’s almost a wonder that we don’t all use Macs.

We don’t for a variety of reasons though. Some of us actually rebel against that kind of thing and can become mildly irritated by the smugness of it. That’s okay though – desire and trust will be very different for different people and as ever you shouldn’t try and be all things to everybody.

Desire and trust has nothing to do with income or socio-economic status. As an experiment, drive through the worst housing estate in your local area and look at the walls of the houses. You’ll see that nearly every house has a satellite dish on the wall, and peer through the window to see the big TV. I didn’t get satellite until last year and only then because it was part of the SKY broadband deal.

I first grasped this concept about 15 years ago when I was operating my first couple of sandwich bars. Myself and my business partner were the only people in our business who didn’t have satellite. We were the ones earning the ‘big bucks’ and most of our staff were earning £3 or £4 per hour (this was pre-minimum wage days). But what mattered to them was having satellite TV and yet I felt I couldn’t afford or justify it. So this has nothing to do with the class system or even some sense of snobbery – it’s all to do with desire and human nature driving us to buy certain things or not.

There is a notion that perhaps we might have all ‘wised up’ as a result of the credit crunch but again that is farcical. The credit crunch is almost the perfect example of why this actually is the truth. It involved people spending far too much money on things that they wanted (or desired) even though they couldn’t afford it. That’s human nature. Certainly there are a few obstacles in the way now in terms of relentlessly buying the big things, but for small luxuries like a coffee? There still has to be and clearly is plenty of money for that. The proof lies in those clients of mine who are utterly unaffected by the recession – but these folk are doing a shockingly good job.

So if selling IS really all about desire and trust which is the most important? Trust is vital but actually in certain situations it’s not even essential. We have all backed off from various purchasing decisions, even if we felt we really wanted them, just because we didn’t quite trust whoever was selling to us and again that comes right down to the level of food and drink. Sometimes you read a menu and it’s organic this or local that and you find a couple of little flaws that don’t add up. You see a frozen food delivery van at the back door or find ‘local asparagus’ in October. If the desire that has been created isn’t strong enough then you simply won’t return. You’ll feel ripped off and that’s the relationship over.

But . . . if you can crank the desire up to such a level that it starts to blot out even the lack of trust then you have a sure-fire winner. Take the example of the people who allow themselves to get scammed by those Nigerian emails. Or even those terribly lonely people who get scammed by potential wives or husbands on the internet. Deep down we all know when something is too good to be true or when we’re being scammed, but the desire for that £200,000 from Nigeria or the perfect relationship can help to blot that out. It’s easy to think ‘Oh I’m much cleverer than that’, or ‘my customers aren’t like that’ but that simply isn’t the case. We’re all driven by the same basic needs. Of course ‘WE’ wouldn’t get caught up by a scammer, but we still make our purchasing decisions every day in life based on desire. Desire is the ROOT of all sales and you should never forget that.

Your job, in a new or existing coffee shop, is to up the ante in terms of desire and trust. You have to create a product so delicious in an environment that is so wonderful that you become the equivalent of an Apple Store. At that level you can sell almost anything and for almost any price. That is the very essence of making people buy and no clever marketing tactics or strategies can ever compensate for a product that isn’t desired or a business that customers don’t trust.