Why you must listen to your clients

Remember, every time you connect with the customer, it creates something. Although you set the stage early, every touch that comes from the company either validates you, or turns you into a liar. So think of every touch that your customer experiences.

Write it down and make a list:

•    Your advertising and marketing
•    Your delivery or installation people
•    Your service and repair people
•    Your help desk
•    Your before-hours or after-hours voicemails they might get
•    The voicemail messages they get when they call you or when they call the department they need some answers in, and they don’t get a live person.

Others in your organization are going to be selling, or attempting some different things. Do they walk the same walk, and talk the same talk as you? What kind of trade show interactions do they have? Who’s involved at each level; what experience will the client get?

Any relationship is based upon communication. This is one of the biggest areas where sales people fall down, and as a result, clients leave. They go away because they’ve not clearly heard all the things that can happen.

Don’t just maintain accounts — GROW them

When you sell a new account, you turn it over to the customer service staff, so they can help maintain the:

•    Relationship
•    Account
•    Order status

We often call this “maintenance,” but this isn’t the kind of maintenance that janitors perform. It’s much more critical.

In fact, change the word “maintenance” to “growth” in your mind. If every time your organization touches the customer, you were challenged to grow the relationship, the order, the trust, the good feelings that your clients have towards you, wouldn’t it require your organization to change a few things?

Would it require:
•    Greater preparation?
•    Solid conversation and communication across your organization?
•    Some thought as to how do we ‘wow’ this customer?

In order for the account to grow, the client has to be wowed. To do this you have to manage expectations from the beginning. And that requires sitting down and looking at your organizational strengths and weakness, opportunities, and possible challenges.