What Motivates Us to Pay More for a Better Product?

Selling better quality solar for a premium is all about delivering high quality customer experiences consistently. It’s the culmination of all the touchpoints between the customer and the business, not just being reactive to particular inquiries. 

Join Charlie Saginaw of Bodhi Solar as he shares an example of fantastic customer experience, why it motivates him to pay more for a better product, and how those lessons could be applied to solar. Tune into the video or read the transcript below. This clip was originally from HeatSpring’s live webinar – Digital Strategies to Grow Your Solar Business. You can enroll for free to hear the entire conversation with Charlie and other panelists. 

The first thing that we all know is that solar has a really high customer acquisition cost. It’s about $5,000. For reference, the customer acquisition cost of buying a car is $600 or $700. 

So we have this tremendous challenge and opportunity as sales and marketing professionals in the industry to lower that customer acquisition cost, and really we have two ways of doing that. Referrals and also Google reviews are two really great ways to lower that customer acquisition cost. 

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So the question here is how do you get referrals at scale? It’s our belief here at Bodhi that the referrals are an outcome of a great customer experience, not just great customer service.

Customer service is actually an aspect of customer experience, but customer experience is the sum total of all of the experiences from marketing to sales to operations to service that the customer has in interacting. 

And so to bring this to a more concrete idea, like what is customer experience, that sounds pretty vague. We’re going to talk about my favorite jacket that I’m wearing right now that is shown on this slide. So I bought this Patagonia jacket in 2011 and I bought it because it was quality and I knew it would last. About five years ago, I went on a backpacking trip and a thorn snagged one of the baffles. It tore out some of the down in there and that was kind of a bummer because it was a $200 jacket. I learned about a free yoga class at the Patagonia retail store. And when I was there, I learned that I could repair my jacket for free by just sending it in.

So I did that and the jacket was restuffed and you can see the slightly different colored baffles where they repaired it. The jacket works really well and I’m using it all these years later repeatedly, and now I’m a really loyal Patagonia fan, even though there’s a Target just down the street with much cheaper jackets, because I have that relationship and those customer experiences. 

I’m really motivated to pay more for a better product. And I think that’s what we’re all aiming for with better quality solar is making that relationship. So that’s really customer experience – all of those touchpoints, not just reactive to a particular inquiry. And so customer experience is really about harnessing the power of moments.