By Tim Kadlec CHAPTER 4recognized that the salesperson was asking merely because of a prompt
from the register. To the customer, this was clearly not an important thing
to worry about. By not discussing the plan throughout, the salespeople
downplayed its importance.
My process was different. A customer would walk in asking for a cord-
less phone. I would say, “Sure, we have plenty of cordless phones and we
also offer really good service plans to protect them. Let’s go look at them
and see if we can find one that works for you.”
While showing them the phones and discussing the features, I would
again mention the plan. “The phone itself should last for a while, but the
batteries typically wear out after about a year and half. The service plan
does include a free battery each year though, so you’ll be safe there.”
At the counter, as I scanned the phone they had picked out — and
before the system got a chance to alert me — I would ask if they wanted
to get the service plan. This worked for 85–90% of the people who bought
phones from me.
There was no magic trick involved, no subterfuge, no attempt to fool
anyone. I believed the service plan was a good idea and thought it offered
value. I made sure that the customer knew I felt that way, before they
bought the item. The result was that they understood this. They believed I
was suggesting the plan not because some system prompted me or be-
cause I was told to do this by someone else — I was doing it because I felt it
was important.
When we leave our discussion of performance to the end of the conver-
sation, when we mention it in passing, we underplay its importance to the
project. By not bringing it up throughout the process, we are saying that
we don’t think it is important enough to discuss further. We’re saying it’s
something that hasn’t much value.
If we want to start correcting the course of performance on the Web,
we must make performance part of the discussion from the very start of
the process, and we must be concrete about it. One of the best ways to do
that is to set a performance budget.