40% More than Our 14oz – Read the Fine Print!
Here is a 20 ounce container of French’s Classic Yellow Mustard that I bought at a local market. I selected this bottle of mustard because of the huge yellow words, “40% More,” but I failed to read the fine print, just like many people who buy from the wrong Online Backup Software company fail to read the fine print.
The fine print on this mustard bottle, just under the gigantic yellow 40% More says, “than our 14 oz.” Well of course 20 ounces is 40% more than 14 ounces. But I didn’t read that part because I was distracted by the 40% More and I assumed this was a bargain, and that I would be saving some money by buying this bottle of mustard over the others on the shelf. So I bought it, without further comparison, trusting those big happy yellow words.
After I got home and read the entire label, I went online to compare prices, and guess what? This 20 ounce bottle of mustard actually costs 50% MORE than a 14 ounce bottle of mustard. So, instead of getting a bargain, I actually paid more for my mustard.
Why should you care about my mustard? Because it illustrates a problem my sales team faces all the time – competitors claiming to be less expensive, and not telling the entire story.
Yesterday a potential client from England emailed to say that he was comparing RBS to another company. He liked us better, but advised us that we were going to have to significantly lower our price because Brand X was far cheaper.
He had read the big yellow words and failed to read the fine print.
The fine print on Brand X says, “You have to pay this same price every year for the rest of your life, or we will shut off your software by remote. The money you pay us is just a prepayment into an account that we will draw down depending on which features of it you use.”
Further fine print says, “You are not in control of how fast you use up your account. Your end users are. So, you can’t predict your costs of doing business, so you can’t accurately set your end user prices. We have seen our customers’ accounts drained unexpectedly overnight and their entire business screech to a halt.”
The fine print also says, “Oh, and we’re going to track how you use our software and which features you use, and we are going to charge your prepaid account with an unpredictable amount of money every month. If your account runs dry your software will stop running. If it runs dry on a weekend or holiday, you’ll have to wait until the next business day to buy more.”
Of course we shop our competitors. We shopped Brand X only last week. Posing as an interested customer we had them quote us a package with as close to the same features as we have in our $2250 100-License Starter Package. They were only able to match about half our features, but they did the best they could.
What was their best deal? $10,000 per year. PER YEAR!! Right. Ours costs $2,250, a one-time charge.
If you are comparing RBS to other company, PLEASE do us both a favor. Give our sales department a call so we can show you the fine print that might otherwise cost you a lot of money, and make your customers extremely unhappy because someone else’s software doesn’t seem to work exactly as they describe it.
