Be Different or be dead

January 27, 2020

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying

Why salespeople don’t like talking to you if you’re not buying.

How often do you get the feeling that once the salesperson you are dealing with finally gets that you’re not interested in buying from them, they abruptly start to close down the conversation and usher you to the door?

It’s like “Now that I see that you’re not going to but anything from me, I’m not prepared to invest anymore time in you.”

This type of salesperson is looking for the easy sale and when they sense it’s not coming they want to dump you and move on to their next target.

Effective and honest sales is NOT about the quick and easy sale that can be scaled.

These quick hitters spend their time designing their sales process to minimize the amount of face-time they have with a potential client and maximize the number of pitches they make during the day to yield as many sales as they can.

And some sales organizations add an additional component to the sales process — “the closer”. This is the dude or dudette that enters the client meeting when it’s obvious the client resists buying.

The closer’s role is to harden the interaction even further and push for the sale. The logic is simple: if the client isn’t buying from the first salesperson, maybe, with more push and a different person they will soften up and buy.

This “get ‘em in — get ‘em out” pressure process gives the sales profession a bad name. It’s the stereotypical hard sell approach devoid of any meaningful human interaction with the potential client.

The salesperson in this scenario cares little about the person and more about the product.

It’s about leadership

This is not a sales issue per se, it’s a leadership one. The reason the sales process is based on speed and superficiality and not quality is because leadership actually believes that it’s the only way to meet sales and revenue objectives.

And they prioritize getting sales over anything else, including building long lasting relationships that will not only spawn a regular flow of sales, it will also create a referral network that will increase sales beyond expectations.

It’s hard to believe in the sales world today, replete with experts pronouncing how critical it is to focus on building intimacy with clients that the impersonal hard sales process is still practiced by many if not most organizations.

Either the pundits have it wrong — and they don’t — or leaders don’t trust that people will hand over their money if they are treated to an amazing experience with one of their sales professionals.

I think leadership is so focussed on showing good performance in the short term that they simply cannot risk investing resources to build long term health.

They say the priority is to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty but their actions belie their intent. I mean how can you even promulgate a relationship building strategy when sales compensation is driven by how many dollars they generate today?

Also, what’s the response if customer feedback is extremely negative; that people absolutely hate the sales approach used?

My experience so far is that your views are politely listened to and abruptly ignored; organizations generally are not interested in forsaking a immediacy in favour of a longer term horizon.

What’s the solution? Will a person continue to be subjected to the pusher and the closer who are only interested in you saying “yes”?

I suspect so, because I don’t believe leadership has the jam to make the change.

If you’re in sales I ask that you push back if you are being asked to push or close products. Take a stand for the people you engage everyday to buy from you, and push for a sales process that is sensitive and responsive to the needs of the client.

And if you’re a potential buyer, go somewhere else where sales actually likes humans.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.27.20 at 04:42 am by Roy Osing
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January 25, 2020

How interdepartmental collaboration can be improved in cool and unique ways

How interdepartmental collaboration can be improved in cool and unique ways.

There’s a BIG problem in how businesses work today—a problem serious enough to stop work productivity dead in its tracks.

Yet, few seem to be aware of it, let alone find a solution.

Business departments are not collaborating as well as they should be.

“Yeah, no one’s working together but we’re still selling well and meeting KPIs. I don’t see what’s wrong here.”

If happier and more hard-working employees, significantly improved work performance, and increased revenue are things your business doesn’t need, then you can forget about fostering innovation.

I trust you are in the majority of leaders who want to see his or her business succeed. If that’s the case, I urge you to read on and find out what’s really disrupting interdepartmental collaboration—and how you can fix the problem.

The silo mentality

Silos are used in farms to separate different types of grains from each other. They’re wonderful inventions of machinery for agriculture, not so much for businesses.

The silo mentality can seep into business departments and affect teamwork and collaboration severely. How this materializes is that departments start to hoard valuable information and become reluctant to share it across the company.

This could happen for a multitude of reasons including power struggles, lack of belief in other team members, and poor communication practices.

The silo mentality is a serial killer of work performance.

It destroys trust and relationships when employees are reluctant to communicate with each other. Businesses cannot take advantage of golden opportunities because they don’t have enough data to make informed decisions.

Customers lose faith due to deteriorating customer service and product quality.

The problem is, it’s tricky to find out if the silo mentality is plaguing your business until something bad happens.

There are several telltale signs to be aware of in determining whether your team members are affected by the issue.

Fragmented decision making

Teams in silos make decisions for the sake of their respective departments rather than the company.

Departments want the best for themselves and don’t see a reason to address the needs of other business units.

Lack of responsibility leading to a blame culture

There is no clear indicator of who is responsible for what in completing company tasks. Project responsibilities float around departments without any sense of ownership.

If something does not go as planned, it’s always Employee X or Department Y’s fault, never themselves.

Non-existent innovation

Businesses may find themselves stuck in a rut innovation-wise. IT systems are still working on Windows XP. Department heads find themselves working overnight on stacks of paperwork.

There is seemingly a resistance to adopting new technologies and innovative systems that make work easier and more enjoyable.

Resistance to change is such an ever-present problem in businesses that the Harvard Business Review has an article on how to overcome it… back in 1969.

Incoherent company vision

Executives and department leaders have different views on how the business should move forward. For example, the sales team is demanding a new CRM tool but the CEO sees no reason to since sales are already going through the roof with the old CRM.

In other words, there is a clash in vision between the ones at the top of the organizational chart and employees who are doing the majority of the work.

Now that you know what’s causing the silo mentality, what can you do to overcome it and inspire collaboration across all business units?

Build a culture of empathy

Empathy is the key to effective interdepartmental collaboration.

You should encourage teams to take on the role of other departments for a day or two. By learning about other people’s work, your employees will be able to look at their colleagues from a different, more insightful perspective.

They can even pitch in ideas from their own experiences to solve the problems of other departments which is one of the most cited benefits of good interdepartmental collaboration.

Can you make someone who is not empathetic, be more empathetic? Of course not.

But, you’re building a culture, not forcing individuals to change their personalities. When you establish a culture of empathy, employees will collaborate by themselves with other business units, no matter who they are.

You don’t need to herd them around like sheep — that’s the power of good company culture.

Tell employees why it’s important to collaborate

Give your team members a clear and relevant cause to be passionate about — why should they collaborate?

When your employees are passionate about the vision and purpose you bring forward, they will collaborate.

The best way to drive this motivation is by telling your team members what they stand to gain from collaborating well with other departments.

It could be fat bonuses, extended leave, a higher chance of getting promoted. Whatever it is, make the purpose of collaboration important and reward employees for their efforts.

Revamp communication procedures and policies

If you’re reading this, your company’s communication procedures are likely to be outdated and inefficient. It’s time to change.

Remove all the dumb rules that impede collaboration in the first place. One common rule that should be banished forever is being able to contact other employees only at a certain time in the day or with a certain communication medium (read: emails only). Never do that.

Don’t be afraid to embrace technology. There are tons of collaboration technologies today that help your employees communicate and collaborate a lot faster than back and forth emails. Slack, Trello, and Jira are some examples of tools that are being used by many leading companies today to great success, which your business can pick up.

Make sure the workstations are working properly and glitch-free, so they support the tools you use for your business needed to enable efficient collaboration. The last thing you’d want is a piece of shoddy software with features that are merely nice-to-haves.

Communication policies should also be revamped depending on what your business needs.

Generally, communication policies should facilitate open and non-hostile interaction between employees while also enabling the free flow of information between departments.

For example, your policy can clarify who to contact in urgent times or how team members should communicate with each other daily (e.g. team chats or face-to-face meetings?)

Lead by example

The final tip is arguably the most important solution in overcoming the silo mentality.

Leaders must embrace whatever change they want to see in their companies. If you want your team members to practice the pillars of successful collaboration, you should be doing the same. Always lead by example.

Inspiring collaboration across all business departments is achievable only if you overcome the silo mentality that is affecting communication and information sharing.

Practice the tips mentioned above and your team will be working seamlessly with each other in no time.

— Lisa Michaels is a freelance writer, editor and a thriving content marketing consultant from Portland. Being self-employed, she does her best to stay on top of the current trends in business and tech. Feel free to connect with her on Twitter.

• Posted 1.25.20 at 05:55 am by Roy Osing
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January 20, 2020

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight

Source: Pexels

How a service mistake can turn into to a colossal service delight.

An astonishing source of customer amazement — and customer loyalty — is how service breakdowns are handled.

Typically service breakdowns include such things as a broken promise made to a customer, a product or service that doesn’t work the way the manual says it should, billing mistakes or service repairs that need to be redone because they weren’t completed right the first time.

The solution to these missteps is called service recovery and it’s formula is simple:

Service recovery = fix the screw-up and do the unexpected.

Let’s face it when you screw a customer over, they expect you to fix it. But they’re not particularly blown away when you correct your error; they don’t say ‘WOW I can’t believe you actually remedied what you screwed up!’

This is where most companies fall short. They actually believe that by merely fixing their mistake the customer will be satisfied and their obligations will have been fulfilled.

The rule of recovery: fix the mistake fast and then blow the customer away by surprising them with something they don’t expect.

If your goal is merely to satisfy a customer, you may be content with having a fix it capability that is incredibly efficient. But if you want to create the ability to consistently build customer loyalty and earn their lifelong trust you need to go further.

You need to move from a positive response to ‘Were you satisfied with what we did to fix our service screw up?’ to ‘Did we blow you away with what we did to recover from our mistake?’

The surprise factor

If you choose the path of wanting to delight your customers and create memorable service experiences for them, you need to understand that the source of of an amazing experience is doing what the customer doesn’t expect.

The challenge, therefore is to discover exactly what that little bit extra is and for them to do it in a way that makes their eyes bulge out with amazement.

And the key is that the surprise act must be relevant to the customer. Providing something extra for the customer that doesn’t resonate with their needs, wants and desires will leave them scratching their head.

And it’s not about coming up with a boilerplate trash-and-trinket program that provides the same bland response to every customer — you’re wasting your money.
The surprise must have personal meaning to the customer otherwise it will be ineffective — in fact could make matters worse!

The surprise must also be extremely compelling to the customer; it must be a high priority with them if you want to impress them.
This is the emotional component of recovery. A compelling act will stir the emotions and make the customer believe you actually care about them.

Customer secrets and speed

The successful surprise requires that you need to understand what makes the person screwed over tick; what turns them on and what action on your part would most likely trigger an emphatic emotional response. You need to know their secrets — reread the ‘How to build an amazing marketing machine’.

You can be relevant and compelling in your recovery act, but if you take a week to get it done, forget it. Your investment will be worthless.
Studies have found that you have about 24 hours to get it done; after that, the ability to capitalize on the screwup and build stronger customer loyalty goes down the tube.

If you make a mistake and recover in a dazzling way, the customer is more loyal to the organization than they were prior to the screw up.

If recovery is such a critical element in building customer loyalty, why are there very few organizations that have a recovery service strategy? I suspect it’s because no one likes to admit that they will have a service OOPS! from time to time; they pride themselves on trying to get it right the first time.

But if you know that mistakes will happen from time to time — and they will — and that there is tremendous strategic value in recovering well — and there is — why wouldn’t you have a plan on the actions to take when the event happens?

In my past role as Business Services VP with a major telecommunications company, one of the elements of our service strategy was: ‘If we fail, Recovery will be our #1 priority’.

We had a specific recovery plan that, for each customer segment, provided the range of recovery actions that could be considered to respond to an OOPS! and the level of recovery investment necessary given the value customers represented to the company — the higher the value, the more robust the recovery actions requiring greater investments.

And substantial training was given to all employees to ensure they understood the power of the strategy and what to do when a screwup occurred.

5 key takeaways

▪️Recovery = fix it and do the unexpected.
▪️Do something personal; make it relevant and compelling.
▪️Know your customers’ secrets.
▪️Execute the recovery process in less than 24 hours.
▪️Build a detailed recovery strategy.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.20.20 at 12:29 am by Roy Osing
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January 13, 2020

Why business process change should come before spending more money

Why business process change should come before spending more money.

Politicians are the most egregious offenders of believing a problem can be solved by simply throwing more money at it.

Their strategy is to capture the hearts of voters by promising to throw billions at a problem they feel is important. If the number one voter priority is health care, for example, the candidate-in-waiting promises to double spending on it as the solution.
Obviously, if you double down on health care spending you’re going to make epic improvements, right?

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

Most difficult problems can rarely be solved by more spending; they’re systemic issues at play that need to be fixed before deciding how much resource to apply.

Throwing $250 billion at health care for example, without changing the way it is practiced and delivered, won’t solve the essential problems.
Nor will doubling the annual budget on billing eradicate the errors made on customers’ bills — in fact it will only multiply the number of mistakes made.

Rewarding ineffectiveness with additional resources is crazy — may as well put your money into a boat.

And the craziness isn’t limited to the world of politics; most organizations have a tough time avoiding the trap of trying to spend their way out of a problem.

Rather than creating a new system for some reason some people think that increasing intensity or muscle power will somehow make things right.

It won’t.

A current system that doesn’t deliver what is expected must be replaced with one that does and should never be the recipient of lavish spending.

Re-creation, rather than making incremental changes to an existing system, is vital and is the only real solution when it comes to problems that have persisted for many years.

The process involves these seven steps.

1. Dedicate ONE person to be accountable

System problems are not solved by committee; there must be single finger accountability assigned and it should be to a senior leader in the organization who has a reputation of getting tough things done.

Far too often a mid-level process or systems manager is charged with the role of making the required changes and they fail because they don’t have the influence and currency in the organization that’s needed to sell the change to all the people with a vested interest in not seeing any change through.

2. Ask the customer how THEY want it to look

What? What do they know about systems re-engineering; about what an efficient system looks like?

Well, they may not have specific academic credentials, but they definitely know how they want to be engaged with an organization.

THEY know how the systems should “feel” so if you care about making it easy to engage with customers, listen up.
Informal focus groups are great ways to get input to help shape your approach to reinventing systems and processes.

Ask the customer how they want to be treated and follow their answer — keep the systems analysts away until you have squeezed out all the customer advice that you can.

3. Define the desired outcomes

What does “perfection” look like in terms of the results that the system must produce? Define the key outputs — a hip surgery in 2 weeks; a product delivery in 24 hours; same day service repair.

Start anew and build the system with no preconceived notions that come from the way things are currently done.

And be cautious about benchmarking best in class and copying their solution to the problem you are experiencing.

Whereas their approach might have some applicability and thus redeeming value, make sure you are responding to what your customers are telling you and not a best practise that worked for someone else.

4. Flow chart it in a simple form

What is needed is an extremely dumbed down version of the new system; simple is good, simpler is better.

And the main criteria to follow is to minimize the number of handoffs as possible.

Obviously, the greater the number of handoffs, the greater the likelihood that mistakes will happen and desired outcomes jeopardized.
Systems experts sometimes overly complicate their work, so be prepared to hold them back.

5. Examine how components of the current system could play into the new one

Even though you are starting with a clean slate and building something new, look to salvage pieces of the existing system(s) that can be integrated and not lose sight of what your customer wants.

Where you can avoid reinventing the wheel do it. But be careful to not be guided by the way things are currently done; replicating components of the current system that may not be particularly effective wont solve your overall problem.

6. Create a ‘straw dog’ version of the new system

Synthesize the brand new elements you have created for the new system with the keeper elements of the current one to produce a draft version of the new system.

Rigorously evaluate what you have created. Beat it up and try to expose weaknesses using customer input and the desired outcomes as criteria.
If the customer satisfaction criteria is less than 10/10, go back to the drawing board to make system revisions until it’s 100% perfect.

7. Get customer approval

Finally, when you think you’ve got it right, take the new system back first to your frontline teams and to the customer for their sign-off and approval.

How many organizations would even think to get customer acceptance? Right. Very few if any.

Internal stakeholders are usually consulted as the system acceptors and are expected to speak on behalf of customers, and whereas they might have a useful opinion on whether customer expectations would be satisfied by the new design, there is only one way to know for sure.

Engage them in the decision making process and ask them point blank if they approve the work; if it’s a “NO!” go back and revise it again.

Systems that don’t work should never be candidates for additional funding, they should be put on the chopping block and axed in favour of new vibrant approaches with a heavy dose of customer input and control of the outcome.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 1.13.20 at 04:09 am by Roy Osing
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