Be Different or be dead

November 8, 2021

How the best salespeople find customers who are leaning their way

Source: Pexels

How the best salespeople find customers who are leaning their way.

What’s a ‘leaner’?

It’s a prospect that’s leaning your way after having heard your ’un-sales’ pitch over a rather lengthy engagement period.

And it’s a prospect that, once they fall your way, will never have to be sold again.
They’re all in with you and the organization you represent. They believe you and they trust you. They are convinced that you will forever look after their best interests. They treat you as family, that’s how strong the bond is between them and you.

And as a result they believe you when you tell them that you need a new solution to a persistent problem they have. They believe you when you say a significant new investment in your product will deliver an order of magnitude increase in productivity.

They’re on cruise control with you in the driver’s seat (at least until you do something stupid that destroys all the currency you’ve built up with them).

How does this happen? How do you as a salesperson spot a leaner and secure them as advocates?

1. Look for the cream

You need a high potential leaner because the time and effort you devote to them must have a big potential payback if it’s to make any sense at all.

Work with your marketing colleagues to develop a list of leaner candidates; those targets—The WHO—with the potential to generate substantial additional revenue for the organization.

Start with a list of 10 high potential leaders; don’t try and boil the ocean by having a list longer than you can reasonably manage.

2. Hunt for the fox

This is where you need good detective work to identify the person in each top 10 organization you should be paying attention to.

The fox is the one who will be making the buying decisions and who will decide whether you get the business or not, so be sure they are the right person in the client’s organization you should be dealing with.

It’s important that you don’t spray your efforts among many people in the target organization; focus on the fox to ensure your efforts are justly rewarded.

3. Discover what they crave

The innermost desires of people - what they crave - are powerful influencing agents, far stronger than what they ‘need’ so you need to put in the time to find them.

Fox cravings are essential beacons that will allow the salesperson to make inroads quickly to establish credibility and trust with the leaner.

Everyone else will be generally looking for client needs which are basic and quite frankly boring client requirements—inventory, communication, CRM, and financial systems for example. These relate to basic operational matters rather than the specific wants and desires of the fox, which could be completely different.

They may have a specific problem, on the other hand, that they want solved to make their life easier and more pleasant in performing their immediate role. If you can discover what this craving is, you will differentiate yourself from the hungry sales pack and be in the best position to capture their affection.

4. Know their strategy better than they do

To be successful with any business client, you have to understand their business plan at a granular level to really appreciate the problems and opportunities available to you.

So, take the time to study their plan and to translate it in terms of what it means to the fox and their operations.

Generally foxes are too busy running their operations and don’t spend the time determining how they specifically relate to the overall strategic game plan of the organization, so if you help them develop the critical few priorities they should be concentrating on to make the greatest strategic impact, you will be ‘a friend for life’ and earn their loyalty.

5. The devil’s in the details

People are generally impressed with someone who can remember details, particularly about them and the issues they face and to capture their attention and have them lean in your direction requires that you are concerned with more than their ‘big picture’.

Pay attention to the micro matters surrounding the fox. Make copious notes on ‘pinch points’ that define their reality so you can study them and come up with potential solutions.

First, the fact that you are paying attention to the small stuff and second, that you are offering viable solutions will make you that special salesperson who gets more learners than anyone else.

6. Keep your promises

Strong relationships are moulded by placing more emphasis on the fox as a person than on the organization as a whole.

Loyalty isn’t commanded from a business, it’s earned from the way an individual inside the organization is treated and served.

And at the most fundamental level, it’s about keeping promises. How do you rate as a promise-keeper? When you promise your fox to do something, do you always deliver as promised? Or do you keep some and make others?

Or, so you even know what your promise-keeping performance is? You need to keep track of the promises you make and the promises you keep. Make it a daily discipline and ask your fox for feedback on how well you are doing.

Looking for and capturing a leaner isn’t rocket science; it’s about doing the no-nonsense little things that make a big difference.

You won’t find leaner-gathering tactics in a classic sales textbook, they’re learned from ‘in the trenches’ real life experience.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.8.21 at 05:06 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

November 1, 2021

6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you

Source: Pexels

6 effective barriers to prevent your customers from leaving you.

Why is there so much talk about the competition?

How to build a competitive strategy, tips for analyzing your competition, how to attain a cost leadership position against your competitors and how to out-sell your competitors pervade the thinking of most business people.

The underlying strategic intent is to build barriers to competitive entry; erect a massive wall to prevent the hordes from entering your markets and taking your customers.

I don’t get it.

You have little real control over what they do. If they want to launch a new product, reduce their prices, introduce a new disruptive technology or enter one of your markets to compete with you, they will. And (unless you intend to fight their actions on legal, regulatory or ant-competitive grounds), you will have no choice but to deal with the challenges their actions pose.

All you can do is try to anticipate their actions and go on the offensive, or respond to them defensively when they happen.

Rather than devote copious amounts of resources, time and energy to issues we have little control over, we should focus on what we have SOME degree of control over.

Rather than build barriers to competitive entry, we should be concentrating on building barriers to customer exit.

This you DO have a degree of control over; you stand a better chance of creating the outcome you want than basing your actions on what your competition does.

Spend your time making it extremely difficult for your customers to leave given a choice they might be offered by a competitor.

Barrier to exit profile

What do barriers to customer exit look like?

#1. Relationships

The emphasis is on building relationships and creating personalized experiences for customers as opposed to pushing products and services at them with a one size fits all mentality.

What customers personally need is given priority over what the common needs of the broader mass market appear to be.
In addition, attention shifts to concentrate more on how people feel when they are engaged with the organization and not solely on the right product or service fit.

#2. Chat

Every manager and executive ‘makes the call’—yes, a phone call!—to customers on a frequent basis to ensure they are being served with relevant and compelling solutions.
It’s an opportunity for the organization to get critiqued on their performance as well as receive suggestions for improvement.

The bottom line is the customer feels valued and respected and are less likely to be enamoured and attracted by a competitor’s value proposition.

#3. Deals

Special offers and price promotions are proactively offered to loyal customers; they are not used solely as a tool to attract new customers as is more often the case in most organizations.

The marketing and sales roles are to be proactive with the customer and present these opportunities before that are made available to the broader base.

People are more loyal when they feel that they are special; getting the deal first will go a long way to shutting the ‘bad guys’ out.

#4. Retention

Customer retention outranks new customer acquisition in terms of priority; the key success factor on the organization’s balanced scorecard is the rate of customer attrition.
It’s always incredibly satisfying to attract a new customer especially when it’s the result of a win from a competitor.

Teams love winning a competitive battle; it’s what makes their juices flow.
The issue is, however, that making your organization irresistible so that customers don’t want to leave can’t be done effectively when there is a strong push to get new customers.

The priority must be on retaining the existing customer base and trust that they will refer you and spread your word to others who will come over to your side — your loyal customers will drive new customers to you.

#5. Policies

The policy system of the organization is built to serve customers not control them. Dumb rules are eliminated in favour of those that facilitate customer engagement.

No one is likely to stay loyal to an organization that is difficult to business with; internal rules that put customers through hoops and policies that make no sense other than to control what customers do as opposed to enable them to get their needs and wants satisfied.

Every employee in an organization has a critical role to be an advocate for the customer and find and fix the internal roadblocks—rules and policies—that annoy customers and make the engagement experience negative for the customer.

And given the inertia that presides in most organizations, to make meaningful change that favours the customer, everyone must take on an advocate role to fight their internal bureaucracy and stand up for the rights of the customer.

#6. Screwups

A HUGE barrier—ironically—to customers leaving is what you do when a mistake has been made and the customer has been screwed over.

Most organizations spend all their time on how to prevent mistakes from occurring (and that’s ok) but few if any have a strategy in place to deal with the situation when prevention goes awry and a colossal blunder happens (and it will).

The fact of the matter is that service blunders that are handled right actually enhance customer loyalty because of the ’impress’ factor.

If an organization responds to a service OOPS! in a way that surprises the customer and dazzles them, they WILL be impressed and they WILL think of the organization in a more positive way (compared to the blunder never happening in the first place).

Impress = Fix the blunder fast + surprise the customer with what they DON’T expect.

Build a barrier to customers leaving by admitting you’ll commit a blunder from time to time and have a plan to recover in an astonishing way when you do.

Going to war with the competition and focusing relentlessly on them may get the adrenalin flowing, but it does so at the expense of your loyalists who have been committed to you in the past and who need you to continue to give them good reasons to stay.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 11.1.21 at 03:25 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

October 25, 2021

Why your customer service must absolutely NOT move to a higher level

Source: Pexels

Why your customer service must absolutely NOT move to a higher level.

There’s one good reason you shouldn’t consider revamping your service strategy with the objective of taking your service to the next higher level.

It assumes you are consistently delivering your service promise today, and that is generally a false assumption.

This is my assessment of how organizations are delivering customer service today:

1. Good intentions — Rhetoric and false declarations rule the customer service airwaves.
Every organization aspires to provide amazing customer service experiences for their customers, that they want to exceed their expectations. They declare that serving their customers in an exemplary manner is their number one priority and they claim that they are delivering it.

2. Call centers — Call centers continue to proliferate around the world. Organizations are outsourcing their call centers more than ever before with lowest cost as the main criteria for determining which outsourcer gets their business.
Call wait times are skyrocketing with customers often waiting an hour or so to speak to a service representative.

3. Stupid rules — Customers continue to be frustrated with the Rules, procedures and policies organizations impose on them.
Internal rules and policies today are generally used to control the customer engagement process rather than to enable it.

4. The run-around — Silo teams within organizations result in customers being passed around when they are trying to get their issue resolved. ‘Let me transfer you to the right department to handle your concern’ pervades customer conversations with the customer having to repeat their ‘story’ several times before getting any action.

5. The push upstairs — Escalation of customer complaints is alive and well these days with frontline employees having to get their supervisor’s approval to deviate from established procedure and ‘say yes’ to what the customer wants. Customers wait for ‘the boss’ to decide on their request and they get angry with the way they are treated.

6. Human dislike — There continues to be many customer facing employees that really don’t like dealing with customers. Rudeness, indifference, unresponsiveness, and indifference are still practiced widely in almost all organizations.
Employees with no innate desire to serve others continue to be placed into customer service positions.

7. Attention to ME! — Organizations, for the most part, still treat all customers the same notwithstanding their claims of providing ’personalized service’.
Service continues to be delivered in a one-size-fits-all fashion with little or no room for the unique needs and wants of any particular person.

Mass market thinking continues to dominate customer service thinking.

8. Screwups — Recovery from service mistakes remains abysmal in most organizations. Most are stuck in trying to fix the mistake (many with no apology) and are nowhere close to understanding how to turn the service OOPS! into a loyalty-building WOW! event.

9. Technology interference— Humans available to help customers are a dying breed as most organizations are trying to adopt new AI technologies such as Chatbots to handle customer queries and resolve their concerns.

The Chat function has been introduced to many websites and is a valuable resource as long as there is a service employee there to engage in the chat. Unfortunately, as with the Call Center challenge, the lack of human availability aggravates the good intentions of trying to make it easier for customers to engage with the organization.

10. Customer trust — The customer is generally not given the benefit of the doubt when they have a problem or complaint and the needs of the organization are put in the driver’s seat. In many cases organizations believe that customers try to ‘manipulate the system’ for their own benefit and don’t engage with an open mind to listen to the customer’s story.

My perspective

Most organizations lauding the great level of customer service they provide actually believe their own advertising.

They think that since they declare their intention to ‘blow the customer away’ with breathtaking service, it happens.

In my experience leading customer service organizations, amazing service doesn’t ‘just happen’ because of an aspiration to do so. There is, for the most part, an overwhelming chasm in organizations between what is intended and what is actually happening in the level of customer service being provided today.

What’s the next level of customer service?

There is no ‘next level’.

The words and music must go together.

Organizations need to bear down and deliver on their existing customer service promises before trying to move to a ‘higher level’ of service.

They need to display a consistency (as rated by their customers) that proves they are keeping their current level of service promises before planning to move on to anything that might be described as a higher level.

They should focus on:

▪️Building a customer service strategy that defines exactly what level of service they intend to provide and the implementation tactics to achieve it with accountabilities assigned to leadership.

▪️Defining a service strategy element that deals with how the organization intends to recover from mistakes that screw customers over. This element is essential to successfully deal with the loyalty in play when things go awry and the customer is left pissed off.
Figure out exactly how to fix mistakes fast (systems, processes and empowerment) and what the SURPRISE! element looks like.

Service recovery = fix the OOPS! within 24 hours and SURPRISE! the customer with something they don’t expect.

▪️Treating customer service as an investment with resources required and payback expected. Expunge the idea that customer service is a cost to be managed (controlled) and adopt the philosophy that customer service is an investment in customer loyalty.

▪️Maintaining control of the resources used to deliver customer service; insourcing the critical front end contact functions not outsourcing them.

▪️Recruiting people that like taking care of others. Amazing customer service rides on the backs of people who instinctively know how to deal with humans so hire as many as you can and pay them well. Treat them as being on the top tier of the organization structure rather than buried in it at the lower levels.

▪️Supporting frontline employees and frontline leaders to enable them to perform their role of delighting customers. Removing internal barriers, providing needed training and rewarding them for their performance are all critical in the service delivery chain.

▪️Carefully balancing the use of technology with people to perform service functions. There are appropriate functions that can effectively be done by technology and there are others that require a caring, understanding human. Don’t mix and match them to manage costs - you’ll fail.

Maybe, just maybe, if work is applied to the promise then we’ll earn the right someday to define what the next level of derive looks like.

But for now, organizations need to do the hard work to actually keep their ‘mind-blowing service’ promise.

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

‘Audacious’ is my latest…

• Posted 10.25.21 at 05:22 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

October 23, 2021

Female tech entrepreneurs must take these 6 important actions for a successful startup

Source: Pexels

Female tech entrepreneurs must take these 6 important actions for a successful startup.

Technology is one of the fastest-growing industries globally.

Unfortunately, it’s not that welcoming to women.

The latest data shows that the gender pay gap in tech is a global issue that needs to be addressed.

Women who work in Canadian tech jobs see a pay gap of about $20,000 per year.

Many women are dissatisfied with how they’re treated and eventually decide to quit their jobs and run their own startups.

If you’re faced with the same challenge, these 6 actions will help you build an amazing startup.

#1. Use the latest technologies for marketing

Any startup needs funding, and female tech startups are no different. This is where proper marketing and networking can do wonders and provide enough funds for the organization to develop.
Women who own tech startups need to go beyond the standard marketing methods and showcase their minimum viable product to the masses. To succeed in their endeavors, women entrepreneurs in tech should use the latest technology trends in marketing.

One example is a technology like VR, AR, or XR. This approach works great with all kinds of MVPs and can lead the user in and showcase an app or a platform user interface. In addition, it can help visualize complex data and allow the startup to connect with the audience differently.

#2. Be more flexible

Ever since the pandemic started, more businesses have shifted perspective and allowed working from home. However, female entrepreneurs may feel pressured to do more. Some may believe that letting people work from home won’t bring about satisfactory results.

In Australia, the largest pay gap is 24.4%in the science and technology industry.

Unfortunately, this kind of fixed mindset might prove to be detrimental to female tech startups. After all, many jobs can be managed online, and employees can be trusted that they’ll do what’s necessary.

Besides struggling with flexibility related to employees, female entrepreneurs might also be too harsh on themselves. This can cause more mistakes to happen and lead to more significant issues in the organization. Female entrepreneurs should know that their male colleagues make mistakes too.

#3. Achieve good work-life balance

Besides the gender pay gap, women in technology and startups often face another challenge—parenthood. Of course, the role of a mother is even more important than the role of an entrepreneur, but women know they need to juggle both.

When it comes to the UK, women earn up to 28% less than their male colleagues in the same tech roles.

To remain successful in the entrepreneurial world, female business owners should primarily quit blaming themselves for pursuing their careers while being mothers. Instead, they should look at it as something they’re doing for their children and their future.
In addition, to succeed in both raising children and scaling a company, they should discuss their plans and aspirations with their partner. Women shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help so they can focus on their careers.

#4. Ignore the imposter syndrome

Impostor syndrome is another issue that prevents female entrepreneurs from being successful. It’s related to the feelings of self-doubt and personal incompetence, regardless of the person’s education and experience.

Unfortunately, the imposter syndrome can make female entrepreneurs feel like they need to work harder to achieve their goals. Eventually, it might take a toll on their well-being and performance.

Here’s what female entrepreneurs should do to overcome the impostor syndrome:

▪️Avoid comparing themselves to others.
▪️Build a support network.
▪️Be honest about how they feel.

#5. Be open to receiving help

Women in tech businesses know they have a lot to prove to themselves and others. Therefore, female entrepreneurs often take on the jobs they shouldn’t be working in. They try to do it all and may often overlook the essentials.

However, women in business need to learn how to be open to receiving help. Regardless of the industry, all businesses require teams of people with different abilities and ideas. Only a business that has all hands on deck can thrive.

Female entrepreneurs should also work on surrounding themselves with like-minded people, not just in business. They should build a network of friends to lean on when things get rough. One of the best ways to do this is to find a community of other female tech entrepreneurs and brainstorm ideas.

#6. Find a remarkable mentor

The right mentor can mean a lot to a female entrepreneur, especially in the tech industry. They can help identify the growth opportunities and share their knowledge and expertise. Good mentors can also be consultants.
The most important thing a mentor can do is give feedback. This is crucial if the startup is new and needs a little push.

In the US, the gender pay gap is 3% for the same job, although the percentage differs based on location.

On the other hand, a role model serves as eternal motivation and inspiration. Role models show that the business can be developed, and success can be achieved. They’re there to help women entrepreneurs do more and dream bigger.

Summary

Women in tech are often facing issues with the gender pay gap. This is why many decide to start their own business. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. Many female entrepreneurs feel like they don’t belong and are convinced their families suffer because of their careers.

Still, if they wish to be successful, they should work on promoting their MVP, show their knowledge, and not be afraid to ask for help when they need it. With the right community and a flexible mindset, female entrepreneurs in the tech industry have a higher chance of succeeding.

— Isaja Karadakovska is a pol-sci graduate, a former Junior Researcher, and currently TakeATumble AU’s Content Coordinator. She is driven to seek and create great content. Her free time is dedicated to her plant obsession. You can visit here on LinkedIn.

• Posted 10.23.21 at 03:25 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink