I’m going to pick on Avis for a minute here but only because of a recent experience and how they represent what I see as a growing trend in business today.  Remember Avis’ slogan “We Try Harder”?  It was in response to Hertz who was (and still) is the #1 Car Rental company in the world. Avis took the #2 spot with pride and used it to help motivate them to get better. They planted the idea that when you’re #1 you tend to get lazy but if you’re #2 you’re always trying to get better. Well, unfortunately now Avis is #3 and they have all but removed the “We Try Harder” slogan from their marketing or branding and it shows.  Go ahead, do a search online, see if you can find it.  I had to go 3 pages deep on their corporate website to find the slogan tucked away in plain text as part of their Mission statement.

I’ve been an Avis Preferred customer now for about 5 years and have noticed a steady decline in their service.  Most recently I rented a Tahoe for a week-long vacation with the family.  I scheduled it 2 weeks in advance online through my “Preferred” account.  When I went to pick it up on Friday at 4pm they told me the car wasn’t there yet and was coming in from another location so I waited patiently.  Then I heard them say where it was supposedly coming from which made me wonder how far away it actually was.  When I finally got them to tell me the real deal I found out that the person had just left Boston to drive to Waltham to get the Tahoe and bring it to Woburn. If anyone is familiar with traffic in Boston on a Friday afternoon in the summer you know that is a minimum of a 3 our tour (cue Gilligan’s Island theme).  So, after taking a deep breath I ended up offering them a solution that would prevent me from losing my mind on them: 2 free days on the rental, drive me home right now and drop the car off at my house later than evening whenever it got there. I think they saw the calm before the storm and realized I wasn’t kidding about losing my mind so they timidly agreed to my offer and brought me home.   The situation was more complicated and inconvenient than what I feel like writing about so at that point in my opinion, Avis as a company had failed to Try Harder. However, there was one guy there who really did step up (thanks Mike) and actually did Try Harder so I gave Avis the benefit of the doubt and decided to not make a stink about it.

When I finally got the Tahoe, it looked to be in good shape, relatively clean, full tank of gas, etc so I signed off on the rental and let the guys go on their merry way.  However, when I started getting ready to pack the car I looked a little closer at the back seat and the carpet and noticed a bunch of dog hair in the back along with a whole bunch of food and junk in the crevasses. I spent the next hour cleaning the car the way it should have been cleaned for a customer who was about to drop $1200 for the rental.  This is what pushed me over the edge to write this blog post. It was obvious to me that Avis, and the majority of their employees had stopped trying harder. They did the bare minimum (15 pieces of flare) to get the car ready for me. They didn’t take the few extra minutes to use the vacuum to get the dog hair out or move the seat up to see the junk underneath or wipe down the dashboard to get the coke (a-cola) spots off.

This experience got me thinking about how infrequently I’m impressed these days with service providers and how my expectations have been lowered so much that even the smallest things tend to stand out.  As an example, I’ve had multiple companies come in my house to clean my carpets. I used to use a different one each time until one day a guy came into my house and put little booties on his feet before walking in the door.  That little thing made me stay with them. I’ve had 4 different landscapers and the one I’ve stuck with the longest isn’t the one who has done the best job on my lawn. He’s the one who e-mails me when he’s going to be late. In B2B Sales it’s the simple things like preparing for a meeting, doing some research on the account before you call, having an agenda, customizing your message when you send out a Linkedin invitation, sending thank you cards. These little things make a difference. Trying Harder isn’t really that hard. The bar is low, rise above. Happy selling.