How quickly do you do your job? I don’t mean shuffle papers, I’m asking how long customers have to wait to receive deliverable product from your office. We live in a world where just about everything is available with the click of a button. You order books online. You order groceries online. You perform in-depth research with a mouse in a few minutes rather than with a pencil and a few hours.
The world moves quickly, and in an economy of rock-bottom prices, it’s the quick delivery that more often than not secures the sale. Your expediency is your competitive advantage – if you can move more quickly and efficiently than the next guy, you will do more business.
There’s an old adage regarding web development work. It can be done quickly, cheaply, or well – pick two of the three. In a premium market, you never want to elect “cheap.” That begins a race to the bottom that ends poorly for just about everyone involved but Wal-Mart. Stick with the other two – quality and timeliness – and you’ll stay well ahead of the game.
When I design a website, I do everything in my power to optimize its loading time. A 3-second website might seem acceptable to most, but if your competition’s site loads in 1 second, you can lose customers. Consider this example:
A customer Googles your product category. They’re presented with a list of the 10 most relevant companies in the industry and click to load all 10 websites in separate tabs in Firefox. Because they’re in a hurry, they view the site that loads first and get right into the content. Meanwhile, your site finishes loading and sits hidden behind a plethora of other tabs.
Yes, your product is better than that featured on the first-loading website, but this fact is irrelevant. The customer wants results quickly. He wants to see a feature comparison now. He wants a pricing data sheet now. He wants to start using your product now.
An extra 2-second loading time fails to address this concern of the customer. Yes, you have a higher-quality product, but you’re failing to deliver on the “quickly” element of our aforementioned trifecta. This leaves you with only price to compete on … and any marketer worth his salt knows you never want to compete on price.
Let me say that again. You never want to compete on price.
Focus on producing the highest quality product you can and delivering it as quickly as possible to the customer. Do that well, and you can set whatever price you want.