Concept
Service as marketing
Service as marketing is Jarvis's principle that for a small business the moments after the sale are the sales process for the next one. Keeping a customer costs a fraction of finding one, and a customer served well enough to talk about it brings the next at no cost.
Advertising buys strangers one at a time at rising prices; service turns a customer into a source of customers. Jarvis's business ran for twenty years on referrals, and the arithmetic holds for any business too small to buy attention: a retained customer buys again and costs nothing to acquire, a referred customer arrives already trusting you. The practice is specific: the follow-up after the first delivery, the reply within the hour, the mistake fixed before the customer notices and told to them anyway, the small unasked-for thing. Jarvis distinguishes satisfied customers from vocal ones and notes that only the second kind refer. The limit is honesty: service that is a technique is noticed, which is why it belongs in the manual as a standard rather than in the marketing plan as a tactic.
A real-life example
A clinic with sixty patients is quoting for a billboard when the owner counts where the sixty came from: forty-one were referred, mostly after a follow-up message he sometimes sent. He drops the billboard and makes the message a standard.
How to use it
- 1Count where your last twenty customers came from before spending on advertising.
- 2Add one after-sale moment to the manual and do it every time.
- 3Fix mistakes before the customer notices, and tell them anyway.