Ever notice two people whispering to each other and as you get approach them, they suddenly stop talking?  How do you feel?  Uneasy? Confident?Annoyed?  Curious?

Well, when I saw this quote by the actor Erroll Flynn I thought – this is so true in business!

It isn’t what they say about you, its what they whisper behind your back. 

Not to make you paranoid – but it is TRUE!  What people – customers or colleagues – say behind your back is a good indication on how well you are building value for those around you.  Are the ‘whispers’:

• Stating how valuable you are?
• How full of integrity and honesty your actions show?
• Questioning some of your recent actions?
• Saying to others ‘You HAVE to work this person, they are so great!”

To build long lasting relationships – meaningful business relationships that provide value to you and them - you need the whispers to include only the best things about you. To be statemetns that you wish they would SHOUT from a megaphone for all to hear.  When you consistently act from a place of genuine care, integrity and honesty you’ll never have to worry about the whispers, because you know they are good.

What can you do this week to generate GREAT whispers about you?  Are there unplanned contacts or actions you can take?  Think about – there probably is something you can do. And hopefully the recipient will be willing to share a loud whisper of the value you brought.

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Customer loyalty should be a goal of anyone who sells, serves or leads.  It doesn’t matter if your customer is a paying customer, a peer, direct report or an internal customer.  The benefits of earning their loyalty are many.

A loyal customer:

1. Will give you the benefit of the doubt when things go wrong.
2. Works WITH you and not against you.
3. Helps you help them – its not just one sided.
4. Can ease your way into new relationships.    
5. Gives you more business!

And the workday is just more enjoyable when you are working with those that appreciate you.

I’m in the midst of a seminar with IT professionals.  Yesterday each person identified someone they liked to do business with – and were loyal to.  They reported on the characteristic that the person has that makes them want to work with them.  The list was long and all but one characteristic was about HOW the other person worked with them than WHAT the person actually did.

Is that a tongue twister?  Simply, your knowledge, technical expertise and skill do matter.  But HOW you work with your customers – communication and focus on what’s important to them is what makes the difference.

What about you?  Who are you loyal to and why?  Leave a comment and give them the appreciation they deserve!

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In sales and service training, I start many seminars by saying that we are going to focus more on “how” they accomplish “what” they do than on “what” they do.  The tongue twister always raises eyebrows…but it is true.  If you need to sell more and strengthen your customer loyalty, how you accomplish what you do matters.

A true story to illustrate what I mean.  As we changed the company name from Corporate Resource Development, Inc. to Sales Pro Insider, Inc. this year, we had a LOT of tactical/logistical items to adjust.  One of these adjustments was to update all the stationary associated with the business.  We used Dana Kader-Robb, of Barefoot Marketing, for our layout and coordination of the printing.  Dana delivered high quality and within the expected time frames as she always does.

The printer we selected (after several quotes) did not.  Our note cards had “jumps” in the typeface for the company name -meaning they weren’t lined up correctly on about 25% of the cards.  Dana coordinated a reprint.  And we moved on.

Know how long it took us to get the reprinted cards?  Over a month!  Not a big deal since we had cards to use but still not a demonstration of caring much about quality and customer satisfaction.  Yet it was two actions on the printer’s part during this reprint that will make us NEVER do business them again: 

1. She sent the new cards Media mail.  Meaning we had to wait longer to receive.
2. The response when Dana questioned the delay was that she knew we had some cards to carry us over, so she waited until they could work the reprinting in with a job using the same colors.  None of this was communicated during those weeks.

Now when I consider the value received, the “what” (stationary products) do meet our needs.  But the “how” of the delivery and follow-up means we will find another provider next time.

In your business some things to think about:

1. How do you communicate with your customers?  After the sale is done, do you give the same level of attention as you did before they said “yes”?
2. When something goes wrong, do you get it resolved quickly and communicate along the way?
3. Do you take a “media mail” approach when responding?  Or a speedy delivery of email or IM?
4. If you are responsible for a process of client communication – are all touch-points as sharp as they can be?
5. Does every interaction focus on the customer or other things?

“How” we provide “what” we provide - whether it be a product or service – will make the difference in future business from that party, referral possibilities and our long term success.

Let’s open the discussion – what examples do you have on the “how” difference?

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Collaborative or consultative selling.  What’s the difference?  Aren’t they interchangeable terms? Not really, a collaborative approach is a step beyond traditional consultative selling.  And an opportunity to sell more WITH your buyers.

Consultative selling is a term in use around the globe.  And it is effective – a selling methodology and mindset where the seller, acting as a trusted advisor, assists the buyer in identifying needs and offering solutions within their relationship.  (from the glossary at salesopedia)  And we know consultative selling works – we’ve trained consultative selling skills for over a decade achieving 5-25% increases in sales in 60 days or less!  But is it enough today?  Are the buyers in today’s economy and demographics wanting  more?  I think yes.  They want to be a part of the process AND solution.  Selling collaboratively allows them to do that. 

The definition of collaboration is:  Noun:  The act of working jointly.  Collaborative selling is working with your buyers in a joint process to identify needs, evaluate how your solution benefits them and then navigate through the decision making process.  It’s a side-by-side process instead of a head-on process. 

This quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes sums it up:

Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up. 

Who knows how much more our buyer can add to the depth of how they use our product/service?  They may have ideas for application, usage and implementation that we had never thought of!  Our buyers are much more informed than they ever were with so much information accessible in a moment.  They have some sort of background, experience or information to contribute to the discussion on most topics.  And when we can collaborate WITH them and jointly discover needs, wants, challenges and solutions to help them, we build a deeper relationship and a more loyal customer.

Who wants to be “told” or “pitched” information?  Not many people, though I may be biased by the fact I live with teens    Most people want to be next to you  exploring a topic and adding their input to the discussion.  Does this mean we don’t need to be the experts?  Not at all!  It means that we need to be more of an expert and prepared to:

1. Ask questions that engage and involve
2. Allow time for more discussion
3. Explore with them  how what we offer will work for them
4. Adapt our communication to their style (including verbal style, decision making style and level of involvement style)
5. Share expertise and information without sales pressure

What’s the difference between collaborative selling and consultative selling?   A mindset of partnership and joint efforts.  

More to come on this topic… In the meantime,  I want to collaborate with you and jointly explore these differences.  What is your take on collaboration versus consultation?

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Want to grow your business in a tough economy?  Use the power of your existing relationships to grow your sales.  Tap into reciprocity when asking for referrals.

Reciprocity is defined as “mutual exchange” – the give and take of life.  And in a slow economy reciprocity can be your LIFELINE!  Many times referrals can be one-sided.  When we focus on what we give as well as get, we are more successful.

3 Lessons Learned to Give, Take and Give for Referrals

Lesson 1:  Give great value and your best referral source will be your loyal customers.

Who are your loyal customers?  These are customers who will “sing your praises” given the opportunity.  They know you provide great value to them and TRUST you. They stick by you in hard times because they know you will do the right thing for them.

Action:

GIVE your loyal customers the opportunity to share referrals!  This looks/sounds very different depending on what you are asking.  For example:

I did great work for a loyal customer and she valued our results and relationship.  But this never led to referrals.  In considering her needs, I realized that she might be concerned that I would be less available to her if I had more work!

To help ease this concern, I approached asking for referrals differently.  First, I assured her how important our relationship was to me.  Second, I let her know that I had positioned my company for more growth through additional consultants and was looking to secure work for those consultants.  And finally, I asked who she might know that would benefit from the work we do in strengthening customer loyalties.

She had two names for me within a week!

Lesson 2: Help them help you!  Identify your ideal referral and the value that you provide. Make it easy for your referrer to understand what you can do for your ideal referrals.  They only know what you do for them and may not be able to explain it to anyone else. 

Action:

Answer these two questions to make TAKING referrals easy:

1. Who makes a good referral for you?  Help your referrer identify opportunities that will be good business for you.  What companies are you best positioned to serve with your product/service?
2. What is the value you provide?  Explain the value in a sentence or less so your referrer can articulate it to others for you.

After 9/11 when the economy slowed, I contacted our loyal customers to review updates, talk about how we might serve them in the future and THEN said, “As we look to the future of our business, we are ready to help more people like you.  Who else is in a position such as yours that might benefit from increasing sales 5-25% this next year?”

Notice I didn’t give them, “Who can you introduce me to?”  Or, “I’d like the names of everyone in your address book.”  I was specific to the value we could provide to make it easier for them to refer specific people/companies.

Over 80% of these loyal customers provided at least one referral.

Lesson 3: Follow-up and reciprocate!  Closing the loop from a referral is extremely important in the give and take of a referral process.

Actions:

1. Give updates.  Periodically keep your referrer updated on the status.  A quick message telling them you have initiated contact or you have a meeting scheduled is always a welcome surprise and closes that loop.  A side benefit is that they might help you even more.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            I couldn’t get in touch with a referral for months.  When I followed up with the referrer, he said, “Hang on, Ill conference us all together and get this done!”  Wow, in a minute’s time I was on a call “meeting” this referral and scheduling an appointment!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          
2.  Give value back to the referrer.  Reciprocate their generosity.  The value can be in a referral to them, a thank you note, information to help them with something, or a  heart-felt THANK YOU.

Relationships have always been the foundation to long-term successful business. The value of relationships is even higher during a slow economy.  Focusing on the give and take of asking for referrals will show how you VALUE your most loyal relationship and give you opportunities to build new ones.

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Want to increase your probability of sales success?  “Lost” customers may be the key!  What do you do with your former customers?  Many salespeople hit the ‘delete’ key and focus on new prospects. Big mistake!  These former customers can make great future customers.  Another tip to recession proof your sales – earn business again from customers you’ve “lost” over the years.

How valuable can this be?  A study done by Marketing Metrics shows that we have a 20-40% chance of re-engaging a former customer vs. a 5-20% chance of turning a new prospect into a customer!

Why is now a good time to focus on former customers?  The consolidations, bankruptcy filings, and workforce reductions leave HUGE opportunities for those who are ready to capture more business in this economy.

What can you do?  First,        look BACK!

1. Review your past three years of sales data. Make a list of customers who have not bought/worked with you in that time.  Then for each organization note: 
   • When was your last contact with them?
   • Do you know what/whom they are now working with?
   • On a scale of 1-10, how likely is it they would welcome contact from you again?  If the score is a 5 or higher, they are a good prospect!
   • What do you know about them that you can use to reconnect? History, experiences, challenges they had, people they work with, hobbies or any shared stories?
2. Research your primary contact at each identified organization.  Use the Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, bizjojrnals.com search tools.  Find out what he or she has been up to!  Are they still with that company?  In the same position?
3. Review past business you did with this organization.  What product/service did they use?  What was their experience – favorable, neutral, bad? Why did they stop working with you?  Do you know? Identify whether this was a valuable customer to you/your company.  Sometimes customers can be more work than the value they brought. No sense in recontacting a customer who drained you

Second, use this background information to prepare to move FORWARD.

1. Are the reasons they stopped being a customer relevant any longer?
2. What value might you provide them today?
3. What experiences have you had since you last spoke that would help them?
4. What information would help them Right now?
5. What questions should you ask them?

Third, make CONTACT!

“Hi Gary, it has been a long time. We continue to help companies such as yours increase xyz or decrease abc.  When we worked together, we provided you with the product you needed at exceptional cost and delivery time.  With all the market changes we’ve still been able to help companies with increasing xyz.  And I didn’t forget about you!”

Then turn the focus to THEM!  Be prepared to listen…maybe there is information you don’t know about whey they are no longer a customer.  This should be addressed first.  Then you can move into a series of open-ended questions that will allow you to see if there is an opportunity to work together again.  Some examples:

• “What are you currently working on”
• “How is this economy affecting your business?”
• “What is most important to you these days?”
• “How happy are you with your current supplier?”

This works!  In the past month we’ve reconnected with former customers. And we found that some of them have done NOTHING since we worked with them.  They haven’t left us at all. And yet we haven’t done business with them in a while.  Now that we made the effort to open the discussion again, we are moving through the sales process to see how we can help them again in 2009.

This tip does take work – but the upside of the effort is HUGE!  You never know what hidden gems of business you might FIND in your lost customers.

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I promised a follow-up to the recent post on the challenge of getting through a phone system at a local furniture store. It was a three strikes, dust in your face, ugly out! And my feedback did get some attention from readers and from Steinhafels!

After publishing the post, I went to the Steinhafels website to send a comment to the President, as the Receptionist had instructed. Of course, there wasn’t a link to “Write the President” – but there was a section to comment and you could direct it to go to different departments. I sent them a link to the post. Hitting Submit, I felt a little relief. Until…The auto-response on the screen said “Your request has been submitted successfully. A representative from our company will be contacting you within the next couple of days.” What? A couple of days?

Fortunately, Lynn S., in customer service contacted me the next morning. Her email was polite, and included an apology and a statement of what they are doing to fix the problem. Great! Then I decided to call Linda personally. I got her voicemail promptly without being stuck in a loop. And she called me back to review the situation. Since she was receptive to the feedback, I let her know that the auto-response added to the irritation the night before. I was grateful she didn’t make me wait a couple of days, but at the time of sending a complaint, reading it might be a few days was NOT what I needed.

Linda did tell me that “we receive over 300 messages a day, and we try to get back to everyone with 24 hours.” She went on to say the message was to make sure they could meet that. Not exactly the answer that made me feel better. I explained, that in the interest of helping them, it is something that they should consider adjusting. Linda said she did forward the information to the Customer Service Manager. She then helped me to arrange the pick-up of our sofa and ended the call nicely.

Okay, I thought. Not bad…but are they really going to fix this? A few hours later Kevin Polaski, the Service Department Manager followed up. He left a great message about wanting to talk with me because they are working on a customer focused initiative, apologized and he wanted to hear anything else I might share. Kevin also personally greeted my husband at pick-up time.

We didn’t connect on the phone until today and Kevin gave me the information on the actions Steinhafels has been implemented for customer focus. Not because of my note, but works in progress. Somehow I seemed to have called during the transition. He again was apologetic, assured me they are working on this, and helped me with the missing coasters for the sofa – another story in itself.

To reinforce what has happened with me and Steinhafels, I was reminded of a study…

THE COST OF AN UNRESOLVED COMPLAINT

This study conducted by the Washington, DC based Technical Assistant Research Programs, Inc. found some interesting data. They found that:

1. For every customer who bothers to complain, there are 26 others who remain silent.
2. The average “wronged” customer will tell 8-16 people. Over 10% will tell more than 20 people.
3. 91% of unhappy customers will never do business with you again.
4. If you make an effort to remedy customers’ complaints, 82-95% will stay with you.
5. It costs about 5 times more to attract a new customer than to keep an old one.

So, with the complaints from last week, Kevin and Steinhafels did things right since then. They were prompt in getting back to me, have taken steps to resolve this for me and others in the future and valued my input. My level of satisfaction is higher now than it would have been had everything gone right in the first place.

And…it hasn’t cost them anything but time. Off-line some have asked “what are you going to get for your troubles?” I never even thought of asking! I didn’t need a discount or free item – I needed to be taken seriously, listened to, and assured they were fixing the problem. Great sales and service doesn’t mean you need to give stuff away.

My reason for the post last week was for all us to learn how easy it can be to make customer contact harder than it needs to be. And Maggi F. let me know that posting a comment to this blog wasn’t easy either! So, we are remedying that situation. Until then, if you click on Comments below the post, it will take you to the Comment screen for you to post. If you don’t want to create an account, you can click on Anonymous and it will submit without further information.

How about you? In what situations have you done the right thing and therefore created a more loyal customer?

P.S. We do LOVE our new teen-friendly sofa!

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During every customer interaction, whether it be 3 minutes or an hour, you leave something behind…a person who is either better or worse off than before their contact with you. To build customer loyalty we need to leave each person better. How?

• Ask them questions.
• Wait for the answers – some people need 20-30 seconds to formulate their response!
• Listen to the answers – really listen.
• Summarize what you hear -without judgment or adding your “story”.
• Help them in some way. Can you solve a problem for them? Introduce them to something that they did not know existed? Answer a question?
• Close the discussion with a recap of actions or commitments that happen next.

This is the part where most authors say “treat your customers how you’d like to be treated”. I disagree! We need to treat each customer how THEY would like to be treated. We need to focus on WIIFT (What’s in it for Them?). That is what makes the seemingly simple actions listed above so tough.

How do we treat them the way they would like to be treated? Pay attention to the pace in which they speak, the words they use (are they thinking or feeling words?) and what is important to them. Adjust your language, pace and focus to them.

Use a simple scorecard for yourself at the end of each customer interaction, “Is this person better or worse than before?” A yes/no will allow you to adjust for your next contact.

What actions do you take to ensure each interaction with you leaves them better?

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Our customer’s loyalty is earned as solutions are provided and relationships are formed. The business times we are in are testing OUR loyalty to our customers as never before. Yesterday I heard a radio ad encouraging listeners to call them if they haven’t heard from their service provider recently. Though this was a financial company, it could be a message to anyone in sales or service. Your competitors are ready to take care of your customers if you aren’t.

With today’s economic situation, the old adage, “no news is good news” may not be the best approach to demonstrate your care for your customers. The headlines are full of news about companies who are struggling and customers aren’t sure which companies will fall next. Do you they know you are still around?

A simple message of “I’m calling to let you know that I am thinking of you.” or “I was wondering how you and your company are weathering the recent economics?” will be very welcome by most. The comment and question may not matter as much as you contacting them and making them feel they are valued.

If your valuable customers heard a radio ad asking if they heard from you recently, would they be able to say “YES, my provider is loyal TO me” and change the station?

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