Show your best clients that they are special

Think about how the airlines treat you a little bit special if you fly with them all the time. It’s good for business, right?

So how do you show your best customers that you’d like to move them into the client bucket? How can you show them that they deserve a little special treatment?

Not that all the rest of your customers, the ones that aren’t in your client basket, should be treated like crap. It just means we move that up a notch. When they’re better customers, they move to clients.

So identify your top-tier clients. Identify them by profitability, or frequency of purchase, or after-sales service required, revenue, whatever it might be. And do some things to spend a little bit more time with them. Support some advisory councils, offer some incentive programs. Show some additional incentives, love trips or dinners or events.

Don’t worry about dropping prices for these people. If they buy more it tends to mean they’re getting more value from you.  Keep the margins where they are. Don’t drop price, add value instead.

Have some value-add training events. Go in and work with their staff, their people. Spend a few additional days with no strings attached. Have a client appreciation dinner. Give them a feeling of importance. That feeling of importance breeds a feeling of loyalty. The best way to get loyalty is to give it.

We’re looking to move people from customer to client so that our relationship with them is stronger, based on the value that we provide. And it really is about the way that they look at us in the end. But it starts with two things. It starts with the way that we look at ourselves and the moves we make.

What does Valentine’s Day have to do with selling?

What’s the difference between a customer and a client? It’s all about the relationship.

Think about Valentine’s Day: Husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, even little kids at school are making an effort to let that significant other know that they are special. So what if you looked to one of your customers in the next few days, next few weeks, next few months and, in effect, said: “Be my Valentine? I want a better relationship with you.”

Why? Because the best sales people don’t necessarily find more customers all the time. They look to penetrate existing relationships. They look to go deeper and wider into the accounts where people are already “raising their hands.”

They look for instances when their customers are saying or indicating things like:

•    Yes, I like you.
•    I like your products.
•    I like your services.
•    I like your prices.
•    I like your process.
•    I like who you are.
•    I trust you.
•    I value you.

When your customers are saying these things, you can leverage that relationship to go deeper and provide more value. And to get new introductions to other people inside or outside of that organization who also value what you deliver. So you get more referrals –  and more ideal prospects.

Photo: Dave Parker, via Creative Commons 2.0

Leading your inside team

Your inside team – whether they are called ‘customer service’ or ‘inside sales’ — enables you to grease the wheels of your progress inside your organization.

You just get more done, so it makes sense to build your team. How? By building relationships inside, and making sure that positive customer interactions are the norm.

Here’s what you do: Make an itinerary and agenda of every single thing you need to do to get deeper into these relationships. Get to know your inside team better. Know their names. Know their families. Spend some time. Have lunch with them.

You have to be the captain of the team, the quarterback who is going to lead the quality of interactions with your customers. And to do that you have to take care of your team.

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.

Good enough is not good enough to keep customers coming back

A common misconception about customer service is that if you’ve got a good-enough product or good-enough service, that’s going to keep them coming back.

Wrong. Today your customers are seeking more. They’ve got options. They can go to the Internet and can find 20 places to get a good product and a good service. In fact, most companies are in the position of selling a commodity — basically the same product or service as the competition.

You can’t believe that, however. You’ve got to be passionate that your product is unique and the best. And it’s only unique and the best if it is in the eyes of the customer.

And you have the ability, the right, and the absolute mandate to create that perception. The experience and the relationship you create makes your product or service stronger. It’s what keeps them coming back. And it doesn’t just happen when you sell it. It happens over and over throughout the life of the relationship.

The first principle is that we are driving consumers to become clients – and there is a substantial difference between those two. Customers are one-time buyers. Clients are lifetime buyers. A customer is a transaction, a client is a relationship. If a customer is liked, then a client is loved. If a customer is a handshake, a client is a hug and a kiss.

Smart salespeople get that trust towards an organization begins with you. Selling is a transfer of trust. Today people are more aware of their options, so that trust has to be communicated on a regular basis.

Customer service starts with you

A lot of us sales people don’t look at it as our job as customer service. We look at that as somebody else’s job.
It’s funny, we can say whatever we want to say just to get the deal done. And today’s customer has their expectations at an all-time low. But, they also have their guards at an all-time high.

In fact, today’s customer expects to be let down. On the phone, they expect to be on hold for long periods, if it’s ever even answered by a live human. They expect indifference from most companies.

In a word, they expect us to suck. And too often, we’re not letting them down. This needs to change. In the sales profession we need to take the full responsibility for the customer’s experience.

Want to grow your sales? Look beyond the commission

We’ve discussed why it’s better to be in a relationship with your clients. To get there, the first thing you have to do is get in the mood.

What do I mean by that? You must develop a relationship mindset. And that means you must have a long-term focus. You can’t be just about the transaction; you can’t be just about the commission check.

It’s about valuing the relationship, and part of that is believing that you are someone with whom other people would want to have a relationship. Because you have:
•    Experience
•    Training
•    Skills
•    Ability
•    Knowledge

Maybe you have all five. These are attributes that your client will value when it comes time to purchase your product. Because they don’t want your product, they want what your product will do for them. You also must learn to think as much you can from your client’s point of view, and that goes to the heart of empathy. We are truly empathetic when we understand where our customers are coming from.

Here’s how to achieve that. Define the top 20% of your customers over the last year. It’s up to you whether it’s by revenue, profitability, number of purchases or whatever metric you want to use.

Once you know who they are, immediately increase your face time with them. And bring value to the table. Get in front of them and offer one idea, or one project to each one of them. Help them get a new piece of business. Ask for their opinions. Ask them questions. Listen to their answers.