Sometime All We Want Is Good Customers, Sometimes All Customers Want Is Good Vendors

By Dave Brock

With this post, any doubt you may have had about me will be eliminated. You will know that I am schizoid, have multiple personalities, or some other disorder. In the last couple of months, I have written a number of times about establishing rich collaborative relationships and partnering with your customers. In this article, you may perceive me as reversing my position. I'm reacting to a lot of things I hear sales and marketing people talk about these days. "Partnering" is the "it" word for sales and marketing these days. I've just been watching a marketing campaign and commercials by the CMO of a major corporation, a guy I really respect, announcing some new products. The tag lines focus on "partnering," and "we partner with you, not compete with you." I look at the materials, and they really are a pitch to get me to buy more stuff. Read more »

Lost Opportunity — Take The Time To Learn From Defecting Customers

By Dave Brock

I've been experimenting for the past 6 weeks with a Sales 2.0 tool. Today, I decided to cancel the service, I wasn't really getting value from it.

I sent an email into the company asking to cancel the service (I've paid for the full month, so I asked that it be cancelled effective the end of the month). The company's customer service organization sent me a nice note saying my account has been cancelled. Other than the minor irritant of having a couple of weeks that I have paid for down the tubes, the transaction was handled efficiently.

However, the company lost a major opportunity. They could have cancelled the service and asked me why I was cancelling. They could have asked me to take a survey, they could have had someone call me to learn why I was dissatisfied. I would have been delighted to have done any of those.

So what has the company learned about my experience and why I cancelled? Could I have been recovered, perhaps I was doing things wrong and could have been coached on how to get what I done. Perhaps there were some fundamental things about the service that would also impact their potential success or retention of other customers.

Sometimes it isn't comfortable speaking with defecting customers, but it can be one of the most valuable experiences in learning how to improve and grow your business.

Original Post: Lost Opportunity --- Take The Time To Learn From Defecting Customers

Lost Opportunity — It Takes Courage To Say You’ve Made A Mistake

By Dave Brock

Yesterday, I wrote an article about my experience with a Sales 2.0 tool and the lost opportunity the company had in not trying to learn about why I was cancelling my subscription.

My friend, Jill Konrath, saw the post and knew the company I was speaking of. She went to the CMO to make him aware of what had happened. He immediately recognized the lost opportunity and contacted me--not to try to win my business back but to learn so they could improve the product and experience. He said they were a young company, growing and learning to be better. Next week we have some time set aside to talk about my concerns and what they might do in the future. I am appreciative they are taking the time to listen to me.

However, the point of this post is not to give you a status update, but to comment on the courage it takes to stand up an acknowledge you have made a mistake. Too many times, we ignore it, we try to push the blame somewhere else, or we make excuses.

It takes real courage and character to admit you have made a mistake. We all make mistakes, no one expects us to be perfect. In my experience, while people may be angry for a moment, they most want to fix the issue and move on. Admitting you have made a mistake, taking immediate corrective action and moving forward is a phenomenal way to improve relationships with customers and prospective customers. It demonstrates your authenticity and that you care.

It could have been easy to blow off my complaint. After all, I'm just an opinionated, loud mouth consultant (we all know we are held in close to the same esteem as lawyers). Plus "no one reads that blog."

Kudos to the CMO and to this company for having the courage to recognize the lost opportunity, admit the mistake and give me a chance to express my opinion. We need more leaders and organizations like this. (Also, thanks to Jill for her help!)

Original Post: Lost Opportunity --- It Takes Courage To Say You've Made A Mistake

Pursuing Sales Results vs. Developing Your Team

By Steven Rosen

I recently had lunch with a highly successful VP of Sales. He explained that he was frustrated with the members of his sales management team, who he felt were focused only on results. He worried that they were not spending any time developing their salespeople.

At first blush, most of you might easily say you don’t see a problem with that. You wish your sales managers were more focused on delivering the sales numbers. That’s easily understood and probably true in many cases.

So why was my lunchmate so frustrated? Simply put, he believes sales managers should be developing his or her people to the best of their potential. He has an admirable longer-term view that is based on the belief that by developing your people, you get improved performance and better retention and you essentially develop a pool of succession candidates.

Most sales leaders would agree that a sales manager really can jumpstart a sales rep’s performance through coaching. Studies reinforce this by showing that above-average coaches deliver 20% more sales. However, it also is true – and a major challenge – that managers generally have the greatest difficulty trying to coach their people.

So as the head of sales, you typically don’t oversee the coaching effectiveness of your team. How do you know how good your sales managers are at coaching? How do you know who are your best and worst coaches?

These are valid concerns, and deserve close attention. Read my next post for five ways to determine if you have great sales coaches.

Keep Selling Time Selling Time

By Kim E. Williams

I work with a wonderful group of sales people. Most of their time is spent selling and doing selling related tasks. These are versatile people with excellent communication skills. It is amazing how quickly they can be rendered powerless by a customer service complaint or any non-sales issue.

Selling is, in part, a people pleasing activity. We want to successfully engage others and getting them to like us, trust us and want to listen to us is a powerful tool to sales success. The mind set of most successful sales people is to offer products or services that are pleasing to the client. Most sales personnel are good at this process because they, in fact, want to be liked.

Customer service and complaints are often about conflict resolution. Conflict resolution, while drawing from some of the same skills used in selling, isn’t about being liked – it is about clear communication, negotiating and drawing boundaries.

Ideally, sales people should be left to sell and there should be someone else to handle the customer complaints and conflicts. However, in the real world, many of us in the sales profession are called upon to handle at least some of the customer service issues. For our own sanity, we can follow these tips:

1. Schedule a designated block of time to handle any customer service issues together. Grouping similar tasks together is not only a good time management technique, but we can pick up the negotiator hat and wear it a while. Once we are ready to move back into our selling tasks, we can be aware of the shift and move forward strongly to sell, leaving the negotiator behind.
2. Enlist help. If possible, let someone else gather some of the initial information from the client. This will allow them to defuse some, and become more amicable to resolution when we call.
3. Handle customer service issues quickly. The longer a client has to wait to have a complaint addressed, the more difficult they will likely be.
4. Have a plan. If we have a clear plan, a written list of your options for negotiating a given situation, it makes the process easier and usually faster.
5. Listen. Step one in dealing with ANY customer service issues is to listen. No matter how much we may already know about the situation and no matter how clear we may be about possible options, we need to give the client the professional courtesy of listening to their story.

Most importantly, remember to shift roles quickly and keep selling. Don’t get distracted and spend too much time or emotion on a non-selling task. The more time spent devoted to sales related tasks, the better sales person we will be. We are a sales person, keep selling.