People Beat Price Every time · Brotherhood Of Scent

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People Beat Price Every time

I had a pretty great WIN today.

A fragrance order arrived from my SA (Sales Associate), and when I opened the package I found an absolutely ridiculous assortment of samples, discovery sets and gifts from houses throughout the fragrance department. 😂

And then came the biggest surprise:

A full 50ml tester bottle of Golden Wood from The Harmonist. 😳 That one stopped me.

My SA is actually with Armani. He’s also the person who first introduced me to The Harmonist, and I’ve since become a fan of the house and added several of their fragrances to my collection.

But I don’t have a relationship with The Harmonist SA. I’ve never even met them.

When I asked my guy about the bottle, he told me he’d gone over to The Harmonist and their SA offered the 50ml Golden Wood for me, explaining that these bottles were generally being reserved for their top clients.

Apparently they know me through him.

And THAT is where this became about much more than a free bottle of fragrance.

I’ve spent my entire professional life in sales and building a business, and one lesson has followed me through all of it:

Relationships matter.

Building them matters. Maintaining them matters. Taking care of people matters. And loyalty has to work in both directions.

We live in a world where it’s incredibly easy to go online, type in the name of something we want, sort by price and buy from whoever happens to be cheapest that day.

And sometimes that’s perfectly fine.

But I’ve never believed that the lowest price automatically means you got the best deal.

My SA knows I’m a fragrance enthusiast. He knows what I own and is learning what I like. He’s willing to walk me away from his own Armani counter and introduce me to other houses and other SAs simply because he thinks there’s something I should experience. That’s actually how I discovered The Harmonist in the first place. And I try to reciprocate. Whenever possible, I make sure my business goes through him.

He also knows my wife is every bit as interested in fragrance as I am. So while putting together this frankly absurd assortment of things for me to explore 😂, he made sure there were things specifically for her as well. That may sound like a small detail. It isn’t.

There’s a HUGE difference between someone who remembers what you bought last time… …and someone who actually remembers you.

Could I occasionally save some money buying a bottle somewhere else online? Of course. But what value do I put on someone learning my tastes? Introducing me to new houses? Connecting me with knowledgeable people? Thinking about my wife when she’s not standing there? Advocating for me with another house when I’m not even in the store? Those things don’t appear on the receipt.

Which brings me back to something I’ve believed throughout my career:

Price is what you pay.

Value is what you receive.

Sometimes paying a little more while building a genuine relationship produces dividends that far exceed the money you might have saved chasing the cheapest price.

The samples are fantastic.

The Golden Wood was an incredibly generous surprise.

But neither is the real WIN.

The relationship is.

That, to me, is why People Beat Price.

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People Beat Price Every time