I recently had an opportunity to invest in a service which would have helped me reach an important future goal. I won’t bore you with all of the details, suffice it to say that the price for this service was too steep. However, during the interview the salesperson advised me to look at a large binder filled with testimonials from satisfied clients. I read about three of them and then a thought occurred to me. Whenever you make any investment (i.e. buying a car, purchasing stocks and bonds, having a brain transplant) the salespeople will always show these testimonials from satisfied customers. If you think about it, though, wouldn’t you learn a great deal more about the company if you could read testimonials from unsatisfied customers. Sure, they might have 5000 happy clients, but how do I know that they don’t have 10 000 unhappy ones? What if the reasons for past failures just happen to meet some of your own specific criteria? For example, when you buy a car maybe you’ve always wanted a Ford Stallion, but what you don’t realize is that everyone who ever bought a Ford Stallion from this particular dealership had their power train go out just after the warranty was up. If you knew this in advance you might instead decide to buy a Chevy San Diego. Maybe the doctor performing the surgery has done 50 successful procedures but there have been 200 brain transplants with the side effect of radically altering the patients personality (like turning a Blue Beaver drinker into a Spoors Lite drinker [oh Gods, the horror]). I’m certain you can think of examples in your own life where you would have made a different choice if only you knew all of the facts, instead of just the positive ones that the sales person told you. The only advice I can offer is do some research on the internet (although you might have to dig a little deeper than just reading the first page that comes up during a Google search) and ask the sales person about their failure rate. I’m sure they won’t tell you the whole truth but maybe something in their body language will give it away. Also, have a few Blue Beaver Beers (but just a few) before going to the interview. It will help you feel relaxed and maybe even give you a little liquid courage so that you don’t feel intimidated by their fancy spiel.
