Your six best friends in the sales process

Here’s an important question: When your customers call in with a problem, who handles that?

Actually, let’s expand that to:
•    Who
•    What
•    Why
•    When
•    Where
•    How

Take an inquisitive perspective for a moment,  and you can begin to see what your sales and customer service functions look and feel like from the point of view of the client. This is a very valuable exercise because it can yield action items that will improve your sales process.

First let’s look at “who,” beginning with who is your customer.
•    Who is their main point of contact, who do they go to when they have to solve a problem?
•    Who do they deal with if you’re not available?
•    Who the most important person for them to be dealing with on a regular basis, who is inside of your organization

OK, let’s consider the “when”:

Why the buying process is just as important as the product

Are your customers satisfied (really) with the buying process?

Customer service levels are constantly changing.

If yours are, find out if something happened, either on your end or your customers’ to change their expectations and perceptions.

If satisfaction is rising, find out what you’re doing right so you can keep doing it.

If it’s slithering downward, figure out how to reverse the situation before it falls off the charts.

That’s once they’re a customer. But remember, we’re talking about managing those expectations in advance.

You’ve got to think about two things: products and process. Now we go out and we sell the products. We go out and sell the widget. We go out and sell the transactions.

How to keep your customers from leaving

For years I’ve been working with companies on how to acquire new business. I help them develop their prospecting plans, marketing plans and pipeline management plans. Just as importantly, I help them figure out how to keep their customers from leaving.

Because things have changed. Customers today buy differently than they did a few years ago – and it’s all about expectations. You are getting Googled before you walk in the door. Meanwhile, your competition is knocking at the door, saying, “We can do it better we can do it faster we can do it cheaper.”

There are a few things at work here: Customers have access to more information. They know that they have more options. Therefore their expectations might be a little bit higher.

The expectations of the customer are truly a major component to their satisfaction, so you want to manage them as well as you can. It’s been said that there two components to customer satisfaction:
•    Your product or service performance
•    And the customer’s expectation

You can have the best-quality product in the world, but if it doesn’t live up to the customer’s expectations, they’re not satisfied.