Details, especially the small details, are often the things that sabotage a potential sale or the possibility of developing a repeat customer base. I was reminded of this when I watched my hometown baseball team completely botch a recent giveaway. For those of you who aren’t baseball or sports fans, you can relax because this is not about sports.

It’s about paying attention to the details, and how failure to do so can lead to a customer service nightmare. For those of you who are not aware; the Colorado Rockies had a jersey give away night for their best player. The problem was that they spelled the player’s name wrong on the back of the jersey.

That’s a mistake and could have been avoided had any one of 100 people been paying attention to details. As bad as the misspelling was, what happened next was worse. The Rockies knew the name was spelled incorrectly on the jersey and went ahead with the promotion anyway; that’s inexcusable and an insult to the customers.

As much as we all try to avoid them, mistakes happen. Every salesperson is going to make mistakes, but its how you deal with the mistakes that matters. If the Rockies had put away the jerseys, given the fans a free hot dog and a voucher to pick up the jersey at a later date, they would have been much better off.

Sure there still would have been some angry customers initially and some embarrassment, but nothing compared to what they are dealing with now. They are being called incompetent and their customers feel as if they are not valued.

The Rockies are dealing with this because of a simple detail that was missed by so many people. Which brings us back to the field of sales; you worked hard to close that sale so don’t lose it because of a simple detail.

Make sure the information is right on the invoice, the delivery date and address are correct and that the customer is getting exactly what they want. There are many more of these types of details in the field of sales; just make sure you are paying attention.

FINAO - Brad Huisken