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Photo by Li Zhang on Unsplash
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Sales You Don’t Know You’ve Lost

For Want of a Sign

After an amazingly well-run class at the Hillsdale Apple Store, I was ready for lunch.

Fortunately, the shopping mall has a stunning food court with surprisingly good tasting (even if overpriced) food.

Yum. My mouth was already watering.

But it was 11:25, and the one vendor I was interested in wasn’t open. All the others were open with lines of eager customers.

Not this vendor.

No lines of eager customers.

No staff behind the counter.

No indication of hours of operation.

No sign.

Nothing.

Maybe it would open in 5 minutes. Perhaps it was a special vendor-specific holiday that I was unaware of, and it wouldn’t open today at all.

If I knew they would open in five minutes, I could phone home (just like ET) and bring everyone lunch.

In fact, if I knew it would open in 35 minutes, I could still do that.

But I didn’t know. I couldn’t “take orders.”

I took my business elsewhere.

I don’t know how much business they lose like this every day.

I do wonder.

I bet that they neither know nor wonder.

Reminds me of a typical owner of a sale-focused website.

Written by Russell Brand

Entrepreneur in residence at Founder Institute, he has mentored, performed due diligence on and invested in numerous early stage companies. Hundreds of these early stage companies have described Russell’s insights and advice as the most useful thing in the history of their companies. He has always had an inborn ability to find more valuable uses of new ideas and faster ways to achieve results.

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