What is your toughest sales situation?  Is it Prospect A?  The Gatekeeper?  Or the ‘new’ guy that needs to prove his worth by making your sale tougher?  Though these might all be REALLY tough situations, many times our toughest sale isn’t to a paying customer, it’s with the internal folks in marketing, customer support, operations and leadership.

Whether we like it or not, collaborating or working WITH others  IN your company to ‘win’ their assistance and support will help you sell more.  Having them on your side makes all your sales activities from marketing, prospecting, presentation, order fulfillment, and customer relations easier and more efficient.

John Miller, author of QBQ! and now Outstanding! uses a phrase that still makes me chuckle, he says that some sales teams call the ‘insiders’ at their company, the Sales Prevention Department.  Now come on!  Are the operations and marketing people really trying to keep you from making sales?  Probably not.  

Like an ignored or unhappy customer, though, they can make our jobs more challenging.

This week I am in Florida working with my Sharpenz.com partner, Alice Kemper.  Watching the support of her Administrative Manager  reminds me why she is so successful.  Alice takes care of Gloriann Perque at work and as a person. In turn, Gloriann will do ‘anything’ (she told me so) for Alice.  And that pays off in business.

With my associates at Sales Pro Insider, Inc. I am fortunate to have Lynn Zimmber, Kayla Kutz and Claire Ziffer help me with so many things – even at last notice.

I see this with many successful sales professionals. They know who to go to when they need to get something done.  They may be demanding, but they also take care of their internal folks.  Some even give gifts or money at year-end to share their bonus and commission that they couldn’t have earned without that support.  Others are thoughtful throughout the year and verbalize their appreciation often.

So today I challenge you collaboratively sell with your internal people:

• Build a relationship with your internal associates
• Ask them questions - understand what THEY do and why they do it.  Find out what they need to be able to serve you better
• Listen – really listen
• Appreciate them and what they do
• When giving them something to do, ask for any potential obstacles and work with them to remove them
• Ask for a decision or commitment. 

Identify one person on your team (it can even be your manager) that you want buy-in from for you and your efforts.  And then begin today to sell with them and win them over.  An easy way is to show genuine appreciation TODAY!  Your benefits will be huge!

What do you think?  How have you turned an internal associate into a huge advocate that helps you?  Who is the internal person that you want to recognize and appreciate? 

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Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: customer loyalty, customer service, maximize sales productivity, Sales Tips

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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Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: customer loyalty, customer loyalty, customer service, unresolved complaint

As a consumer AND sales and service expert, I can be a discriminating buyer. I LOVE to buy from sales professionals who understand that the best way to earn my loyalty is to give me great service, ask me questions and make the experience quick and easy.

Tonight my family shopped for furniture for the family room that was unplanned – I won’t take space to mention too much about how hard BIG teenage boys are on furniture when they can’t be seen. As we shopped we had the pleasure of working with Julie K. at Steinhafels in Greendale, WI. She greeted us well, asked us how she could help and then pointed us in the right direction. It wasn’t an easy process, trying to get teens and parents to agree, but she was patient, left us at the right moments for discussion, found information we needed outside the norm and actually did ask for a decision!

My husband wanted to think about this unplanned purchase overnight. Julie agreed and gave us her card and her schedule. On the ride home, we decided that we should just order the sofa. It was perfect, in our price range and we didn’t want to spend another evening or day shopping.

This is where the story turns. I dialed the phone number on the business card and was sent to the “corporate” office. And heard the familiar recorded message “If you know your party’s extension, you can dial it at anytime.” Yeah! Julie had written her extension on the card! So I dialed it. And was circled back to the opening message of the corporate office again…I dialed again (figuring I dialed in error)…and back to the corporate office message again…dialed…again the message…pressed “0″…and again the corporate message.

Of course, I figured I was doing something wrong, so I hung up and dialed again. And had the same experience. Then I dialed the direct line instead of the 800 number, and was circled round and round again.

Next? I got on line to research where else I might buy the sofa we liked so much. They had now made it too difficult for me to buy! But could not find it anywhere.

So, I took out the phone book and AHA! a different phone number for the specific store. But…it connected to the SAME corporate message. This time the “0″ finally worked and I got someone live. Yeah, “Could you please connect me with Julie K.?” A very long pause and then…”Um, do you know what store she is at?” By now, over 26 minutes had passed and my irritation was high. “Greenfield”, I said. And when she transferred me? Yup! Back to a recorded message and when I dialed the extension, I got another garbled message that it could not be transferred and then it disconnected.

What??!!! I called back the phone number to get the live person and explained to her what happened and that I was extremely irritated, that I knew it wasn’t her fault, but that they had to do something about this phone system. I then said I wanted to send a letter to the President to explain and she told me to go the website and contact customer service. Then she said “I know its frustrating…I’m sorry, I will stay on the phone in conference to make sure you are connected.” Okay, now we’re talking.

Until, I got a person at the correct store and when I explained to her that it had been nearly 30 minutes since I started this process, she told me “I know, the phone system is awful and my family can’t even get in touch with me!” What??!!! What do I care about her family getting in touch with her? I am a customer trying to make a nice size purchase! She did then transfer me to lovely Julie who was apologetic and said that she has commented on the phone situation weekly because it drives customers away and they are not supposed to give out the direct store number.

She then very nicely took my order and I let her know that I will be contacting the president. And she said again she was sorry.

Count how many times I explained my frustration and how many employees agreed. THREE! That is a big O-U-T in baseball! And while all were sympathetic, no one took ownership to fix it for future customers.

Being in the business of helping organizations with sales and service productivity, I will contact the President and try to help them understand the significance of this inconvenience to their bottom line. They only got my sale because I did not have another option to get what we wanted.

Think about your company – what are the barriers to a customer getting to someone to help them? Is the process difficult enough that many (or even some) will say “forget it!”?

You might also be thinking “you should have hung up!” And, yes I would have if it hadn’t been the one sofa we all agreed on and I wasn’t going to spend hours more shopping. I could have never guessed how long getting through would take.

I’ll let you know what kind of progress I make with the company. Let’s see how long it will take to get to someone live tomorrow.

Comments and advice welcome!

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Filed Under: Uncategorized
Tags: customer loyalty, customer service, Sales