I've seen the syndrome a few times where a long time customer is suddenly getting signs from elsewhere.
The other day a young lady called up asking for their hardware store logo. I've sent these folks copies of their logo before, but it's pretty common for customers to lose art files. Anyway, I was asking her about what file formats she needed and she was a bit confused by the jargon. She admitted she needed the art files for getting some banners made. I told her we make banners. She said she thought we only made big electrical signs. I replied we make everything from little cheap yard signs to high rise lighted signs and most things in between.
We can make your banners too. I think she realized she let the cat out of the bag and just got off the phone line with me.
One thing that really annoys me, some
"customers" will come to us first, but with no actual intention of buying anything from us. But they still want to use us to figure out what kinds of signs they actually need since we're
"a real sign company." They want to get us to do all sorts of leg work for free, like going to their business to survey the building or measure an existing sign structure. Of course they want to see multiple sketches and revisions. The final part of the ploy is taking our bid and sketches to other rival sign companies to see if they can get the same work done cheaper.
The trick is figuring out which customers are actually serious about buying something versus the clowns that only want to waste your time and efforts. When we can spot the price shoppers we'll just give those folks a flat price without drawing anything.
Gene@mpls said:
Just noticed I am a new member- interesting.
I was annoyed by the same problem. It's just a default label. You have to go into your member profile and edit the tag.
