Remember that email I sent few months back about the dead fly in my food?
The one where I talked about how I went to a new bistro in town for a takeout cheeseburger, opened it up, and found a scraggly “deep fried” fly sitting neatly next to it, as if it were but an innocent parsley leaf?
Well, believe it or not, we went back there.
Actually, my wife did. (I’ll never go back. Ugh.)
Turns out her love for good fish (which they are known for) trumps even the fly incident.
Why am I telling you this?
Because when she called her order in, she made sure to speak with the owner and re-tell him the fly story from before (his reaction last time was, “Oh, that’s a first”, with no apology or so much as a gesture to make it right).
And this time, he DID apologize.
In fact, he said my fly story had gotten around town and he’d spent a bunch of buckeroos putting things in place to make sure it never happened again. And to try to make up for it, he even gave her a discount on her order that day (what I now call “the dead fly discount”) to boot.
Anyway, long story short… she tried the fish.
And she LOVED it.
And despite the owner dude falling FAR short of what he SHOULD have done to make the situation right (IMHO), she’s gone back there every Friday since — 3 times in a row now.
Even with that whole fly fiasco fresh in her mind.
And even with me making obnoxious fly jokes with every bite.
OK, so what’s the moral of the story?
Probably there isn’t one.
Except that, maybe an excellent product really WILL cure a lot of sales and marketing “sins” after all.
Even the nasty ones that’d normally get you run out of town.
Just a little food for thought 
Ben Settle
P.S. Learn 101 ways to sell without relying on dead fly discounts or needing to have the world’s best product at:
