Be Different or be dead

June 27, 2011

3 simple ways sales can build the greatest customer relationships

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3 simple ways sales can build the greatest customer relationships.

Effective sales depends on building deep relationships with your customers

Intimate relationships. Trusting relationships. Long term relationships. Mutual benefit relationships. Cherished relationships. Memorable relationships. “Gaspworthy” relationships.

The end game is to establish such a strong bond with a customer they will never ever think of doing business with someone else. Customer intimacy results in barriers to customer exit; a far more effective approach that worrying about what the competition may be up to and over which you have little control.

Try these three things to get you on your way:

1. Declare that bonding is in; flogging is out

The business plan of the organization must include customer relationship building as a key strategic imperative in order to make it matter for sales.

Relationship building requires that a new strategic context be struck and communicated to the organization.
Make relationship selling matter. If you don’t make relationships a key element of your sales strategy and a key success factor for the organization, nothing will change.

2. Pay on relationships

Make relationship building a critical element of the sales performance and compensation plan.
Outline it as an expectation and include it in the sales bonus plan. That’s the only way sales people will pay attention to it.

Sales is the most compensation-driven function in any organization. Show a salesperson the compensation plan and watch them go. No question what their priorities and focus will be. Their actions will be directly aligned with what they are getting paid to do.

Introduce relationship building as the metric. Define no more than 6 that you feel are critical to your success. You could adopt proactive solution presentations, listening and engaging, follow-up, keeping promises and internal advocacy as behaviors you intend to hold sales accountable for. Don’t make it complicated, but implement it.

Year 1 make relationship building 20% of sales compensation and increase it every year thereafter at a pace and to a level you are comfortable with.

3. Engage customers in rating sales performance

How do you measure relationship building behavior? Introduce a customer report card and get the customer to rate how the person is doing on each behavior.
This approach will not only change sales behaviour, it will also bond you closer to your customer. Being open to customer input and actually caring about what they have to say will endear them more to you. Count on it.

Moving from a product flogging culture to a relationship building one is a major change.

Be patient. Don’t expect results overnight. But stick to your plan.

And get started.

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

• Posted 6.27.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 19, 2011

How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale

Source: Unsplash

How the customer can still be loyal after you lose the sale.

How many salespeople would consciously put their sale at risk in order to protect a long term customer relationship?

How many would continue to put time in with the customer even though they realize the probability of making the immediate sale is low?

How many would put their yearly quota in jeopardy in favour of securing an account for the benefits they will realize over the long term?

I suspect there would be an extremely small number of salespeople who would put up their hand and fess up to sacrificing the short term for the long term; and that is sad, unfortunate and just plain bad business.

The flogger is bad business

The fact is, an unrelenting focus on the immediate sale increases the chance that the salesperson will be a ‘one-sale wonder’, a ‘flogger extraordinaire’ who will be unable to offer any long term value to their organization.

Long term value creation in sales is all about building strong intimate customer relationships that will yield a relatively stable and healthy cash flow over future periods; it’s not about making the sale today.

The role of sales must change from the flogger of products and services to the ‘gatherer of friends’.

Relationships are all there are in sales and it is absolutely critical that they be protected, nurtured and strengthened in every moment a salesperson has with their customer.

The absolute worst thing that can be done is to erode the friendship by maintaining a short term product sale focus.

It’s all very well that sales leaders espouse the building relationships vision; it’s quite another when sales is confronted in the field with a situation where the organization’s products and services don’t meet the customer’s requirement.

Square peg in a round hole

This is the moment of truth. It’s that moment when the intent and action collide to discover if the organization is really serious about building long term relationships or whether it’s merely an aspiration with no substance.

Let’s face it, there are times when there isn’t the right fit between what the customer wants and what the organization supplies. It’s not a catastrophic situation; it’s impossible for an organization to expect to have a solution portfolio to match every problem their customers experience.

Your solution perhaps doesn’t have the right functionality to do what the customer specifically wants, or it might not be available when the customer wants it, or it might not meet their price expectations and there’s little to be done to satisfy them by adding value to the solution and selling at a premium price.

When this happens, the wrong thing to do is to try and force fit the organization’s solution into the customer’s problem in order to try and make a sale — again, it’s product flogging behaviour that will punish friendship building and long term performance.

Not only that, it’s more than likely to fail. Customers generally don’t like to get bullied into a sale and if a salesperson is into the force fitting mode, the customer will know it and will not buy. And two negative results occur. Not only is a sale not made, the friendship is diluted by the flogging behaviour.

The right thing to do is to walk away from trying to satisfy the customer with the organization’s solutions and refocus the energy on determining what can be done to ensure the relationship is deepened.

These principles should govern what a salesperson should do in this situation.

Sales Principle #1 — Own the customer forever

What does ‘owning the customer forever’ mean when the right solution for your client is not available from your company? If it’s not spelled out in detail, the salesperson won’t know what to do and how to behave and could risk the relationship ‘going south’.

Every action taken by the salesperson must be through a long term lens and leadership must draw a line of sight from this lofty goal down to the specific actions a salesperson must take when confronted with the challenge of a product or service misfit.

‘Owning the customer’ is a long term investment, not a quick buy-and-sell transaction.

You cannot leave it to the salesperson to decide how to respond; they will behave the way they traditionally have: bail on the friendship because there’s no quota payback from hanging around.

Sales Principle #2 — Do whatever it takes to protect Sales Principle #1

Every action sales takes must serve the purpose of solving the customer’s problem with whatever solution is available and from whatever organization supplies it.

Owning the relationship is a caveat-free goal without the constraint of solving the customer’s problem only with the organization’s solution set.
Rather, it’s an empowering notion that says to the salesperson “Go wherever you have to and do whatever is necessary to solve the customer’s problem. Period.”

It’s a narrative that needs to be an automatic response to a product or service deficiency — if this, then that.

It’s about you!

If you’re looking for a silver bullet to blow your customer away, this strategy is it. It basically subordinates the short term needs of the organization to the immediate needs of the customer; it says emphatically to them ’It’s all about you’.

As a loyalty building behaviour it’s probably the most powerful thing a salesperson could do.

Sales Principle #3 — Pay for the behaviour you want

If you want sales to behave a certain way, you must pay them for it. That’s the way salespeople are.

If it ain’t in the sales compensation plan it doesn’t get done.

Declaring the customer ownership goal and defining the specific behaviour sales must exhibit in order to achieve the goal is not sufficient; a measurement and reward system must be in place to ensure the right behaviour is constantly being practiced.

The measurement tool is simple: ask the customer if their salesperson offered other company’s solutions. If you don’t have a customer perception survey — the sales Report Card — in place, you should, because it’s the only way to get a handle on sales behaviour.

Owning the customer is more than sales revenue performance, it’s doing the right things today that will enhance the chances of maintaining a healthy revenue stream from the customer over the long term.

The rewards system is equally straightforward: include a compensation component in each salesperson’s annual performance plan for this practice. If 20% of their annual bonus is related to ‘selling someone else’s solution’, it will get done.

Building a long term friendship requires a great deal of emotional energy relentlessly applied day in and day out. And it involves sometimes taking a step back from our needs to put the other person first.

This is such a time in the world of sales, and those organizations who make the practice matter are the long term winners.

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

• Posted 5.19.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 9, 2011

Why customer intimacy is the best way to get repeat sales

Source: Unsplash

Why customer intimacy is the best way to get repeat sales.

Marketing and sales today are focused on pushing products and services.

The main problem with this approach is that no one appreciates getting something shoved down their throat.

So why do organizations continue to covet this flogging strategy?

It’s an easy route to follow. Focus on what you produce or supply. Be mesmerized with functionality.

Believe that if you advertise it far and wide people will come to their senses and buy.

Unfortunately the easy route is not very often the successful one that will make your organzation remarkable and indispensable because the herd is doing it in unison.

Let’s get back to Humanity 101.

People buy stuff because they feel they are getting value that somehow makes their life better.

Happier.

And the source of value delivery is an intimate relationship.

People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories and magic —Seth Godin, marketing mastermind

Bonding with another human being takes time. Patience. Asking questions. Listening intently. It’s a tough job. But in the end it’s the ONLY process that will generate a long-term revenue stream.

If you really want to flog, flog intimacy.

Product pushing definitely has a limited existence.

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

• Posted 5.9.11 at 11:00 am by Roy Osing
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May 4, 2010

How to make salespeople build excellent customer relationships

Source: Pexels

How to make salespeople build excellent customer relationships.

Sales must turn away from the traditional product flogging practice to building deep intimate relationships with customers.

The challenge becomes one of jarring sales loose from years of “product love” into a world where relationships rule.

Here’s some leadership hints to get you going:

— First, declare to the sales organization that you intend to move to a relationship-building (RB) performance management structure in 36 months. Discuss why the product-only method won’t work over the long terms and that sustainable competitive advantage requires the change.

— Set out year 1 changes: immediately sales performance management and bonus compensation will be based 80% on product revenue; 20% on measured RB competency.

— Then advise them that year 2 will look like: 50% product revenue; 50% RB competency.

— Then tell them that year 3 will move to 30% product; 70% RB.

— Of course you can decide on the distribution that fits your own circumstances, but I suggest that the shift away from the product approach be bold. If not, your aspirations to change won’t be believable and sales will continue to exhibit past behaviours.

Establish a customer report card to measure the RB performance of each salesperson by following these 9 steps.

1. Define 6 RB behaviors you expect each salesperson to demonstrate. Could be: listening, empathizing, follow up, consultation etc. The behaviors chosen must line up with the business plan and values for your organization.

2. Weight each behavior as some may be more important than others.

3. Decide on a rating system for each behavior. I used ‘poor’, ‘fair’, ‘average’, ‘good, and ’ as the rating categories. It worked well.

4. Set year-end objectives for each RB behavior. A typical would get a target of 80% ‘good/excellent’ ratings.

5. Get the executive to sign off on the targets to ensure consistency with the game plan of the organization.

6. Engage customers to rate their sales person on each RB behavior. Do it monthly. Encourage written comments. The more customer commentary to explain the numerical ratings the more useful the overall process will be in terms of understanding the behavioral changes necessary.

7. Issue performance results monthly.

8. Require each salesperson to create an action plan to improve the RB behaviors below target. A meeting with their manager will present the opportunity for coaching.

9. Celebrate the “most improved” salesperson in relationship-building. Make it matter to everyone. Eventually have it dominate the sales recognition and reward program.

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

• Posted 5.4.10 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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