How the butcher taught me to go up the Sales Value Chain !

Full disclosure - I have never visited a butcher but this story I heard about one tempts me to confer a Sales Guru title on the protagonist ! The story goes something like this - an old lady in a village went to the market to buy supplies for the home every week. She would buy meat from which ever butcher had the better product on the day at the best price. She was buying a Commodity which offered the sellers little opportunity for differentiation or for longer term customer retention.

Over time she started  buying meat more often than not from the same butcher because he seemed to usually have better quality goods & a reasonable price. This butcher had made the transition to selling a Product with some kind of assurance of quality & potential for garnering customer loyalty.

After a few weeks of this the butcher told the lady that he had noticed that on each visit she bought items from a few different shops & he offered that if she would give him a list of all the things she wanted in the week in advance he would buy all the items & keep them at his shop for her to pick up when she came to buy the meat. This would save her time & effort & she could still get everything she needed.  The lady eagerly accepted the Service the butcher was offering. The move from a Product to a Service allows much greater scope for differentiation & for tailoring unique benefits for customers that could potentially reduce the need for the customer to consider competitors.

It then transpired that the lady fell ill & could not make it to the market for a couple of weeks. While recuperating at home she was surprised by a visit from the butcher. He had with him a bundle of goods typical of those the lady usually ordered along with some portions of meat. In response to the lady's incredulity he said that he had inquired from one of the lady's friends at the market the reason for her recent absence & learnt of her illness. He thought of paying a visit to check how she was doing & of getting some supplies along since she would not have been able to stock up on provisions for two weeks. Clearly the butcher, apart from being a nice guy, was a true sales genius. In one move he stepped up the ladder to forming a genuine Relationship with his customer - something that most sales people dream of. After achieving this stage as long as one can consistently deliver value you could have a customer for life. 

The story of the butcher & the lady serves up a road map for those of us in sales - the aim should always be to move up the value chain from a Commodity to a Product to a Service & finally a Relationship. The higher one goes the greater the opportunity for differentiation & for cementing customer relationships that last. The other lesson to be learnt is to pay attention to those that we buy from - after all they're sales people too & may have a nugget or two of wisdom to offer !