Don't Rush the Sale, Your Customers are People, Too!

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Don't Rush the Sale, Your Customers are People, Too!

Written by Dan Jourdan

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Customer Retention in Difficult Economic Times

When I was a young boy, I spent many afternoons after school at my grandfather’s carpentry shop. He never had a formal education but was a highly skilled tradesman. His finished work and services, such as handcrafted furniture and home improvement projects, were much in demand. He never advertised but was the beneficiary of word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers.

Customer retention is essential to the long-term success of every organization, but it becomes critically important during difficult economic times. This is the most crucial time to really wow your customers. Truly good customer service is all about building the relationship. From the first impression to the latest interaction, your customers will choose to buy or stop buying from you based on the success or failures of those interactions. So in today’s stressed out, do-more-with-less climate, we all need to offer a customer interaction that exceeds expectations and builds a solid foundation of trust into that important customer relationship.

Three Zones of Customer Satisfaction
It does little good to make a sale if your company or organization cannot service your current customers. Your customer service strategy and culture should consist of action plans to address the three zones of customer satisfaction.

1. The Service Surprise Zone (what we call the Wow Zone) is when you exceed your customer’s expectations. You should strive to wow your customers, especially your key accounts and prospects.
2. The Service Expectations Zone is when you meet your customer’s expectations. At a minimum, your organization needs to identify and then meet the critical needs and expectations of your customers. As such, the ability to ask questions and to listen for the customer’s concerns and issues, are critical skills.
3. The Service Recovery Zone is when you don’t meet your customer’s expectations. This zone is a moment of truth. Handle it well and you can actually strengthen the customer allegiance. But, if this is handled poorly, you run the risk of losing customers.

Customer Service Statistics
Many customer satisfaction surveys, from a wide range of industries, show a common pattern in terms of how customers react to situations depending on whether they are wowed or dissatisfied:

An extremely satisfied customer will typically tell 2 to 5 other people or organizations about their positive experience. In other words, a wowed customer will provide unsolicited referrals of business for you.
An extremely dissatisfied customer will tell 5 to 20 other people or organizations about their negative experience, and encourage prospective customers not to use your company’s products and services. This creates bad word-of-mouth and damages your reputation in the marketplace.
The majority of extremely dissatisfied customers (as many as 90%) will stop doing business with your firm without letting you know that they are leaving. As such, it is a double negative if you don’t respond well to a Service Recovery situation. You likely will lose the customer, and then that same customer will tell other prospective customers not to use your company or products.

Wow your Customers
There are many ways to wow your customers. Here are three suggestions from our Exceptional Customer Service workshop:

Be pro-active about communicating with customers, especially when you become aware that a problem, such as a delayed shipment, may occur. Be sure to call the customer to advise them of the problem and offer some solutions or options.
Follow-up with customers even when there aren’t any problems; for example, call or email a customer that you haven’t spoken with in awhile.
You should strive to be in the Service Surprise Zone whenever possible. We realize that it may not be practical to wow every customer. If you have to be selective about wowing customers, your customer service strategy should focus on wowing these three categories of customers: (1) key accounts, because the loss of a key account can have a severe effect on profits and sales goals; (2) growth accounts because of their longer-term sales potential; and, (3) new accounts, because you want their initial impression of your company to be favorable.

Building Customer Service the Carpenter’s Way
I often conclude the teaching of our Exceptional Customer Service workshop with the following real-life story.

When I was a young boy, I spent many afternoons after school at my grandfather’s carpentry shop. He never had a formal education but was a highly skilled tradesman. His finished work and services, such as handcrafted furniture and home improvement projects, were much in demand. He never advertised but was the beneficiary of word-of-mouth recommendations from satisfied customers.

In retrospect, it was fascinating to see how he interacted with customers. He always thanked customers for their business, both initially when an order was placed and also when the furniture or project was completed. Whenever possible, he gave each customer more than he or she had requested. I recall him building a beautiful bookshelf and using some of the leftover scrap wood to make some bookends for the same customer. Because the wood was of the identical type and grain, the bookends matched perfectly with the bookshelf.

Now that I am older, I spend time advising and teaching clients about many of the things I learned by observing my grandfather’s extraordinary commitment to his customers. To follow my grandfather’s example, ask yourself these three important questions:

1. Are you wowing your customers? Customers who receive a superior product or service will recommend your organization to others, just as my grandfather benefited from word of mouth referrals.
2. Are you treating your customers with respect? It can be as simple as a heartfelt “Thank you for your business.”
3. Are you exceeding your customer’s expectations? It doesn’t necessarily have to cost you a lot to give a customer more than he or she expected, such as my grandfather’s bookends.

If you like this article, click here for more resources on sales success.

Selling to Humans

Just about every day, in every city in the Country, it would not be uncommon to hear some honking during the morning rush hour. This morning was no different. People were driving to work and getting frustrated, they were stopping for traffic lights and school busses and then the cars in both directions came to a standstill due to a family of geese trying to cross the road.

The remarkable thing was the honking from the people stopped when the honking from the geese started. It was like every person came to the conclusion at the same time that there was nothing they could do but wait for the geese to pass and smile. I saw this as signs of humanity at work. How could you honk at the car in front of you if he would run into a fuzzy little gosling?

What Is in His Head?

In your world of sales, do you ever find yourself pushing a customer to buy without knowing what is in front of him, or what is in his head. That is inhumane. You see, your customers are people too; they all buy or don’t buy for their own reasons. Trying to sell before you know why they buy is both frustrating and in many cases futile.

It also confirms the reputation of a salesperson and ruins it for the rest of us. People like to be treated like the humans that they are, and human people like a chance to talk about themselves and tell you what they want if you would just listen.

Start Getting Your Customers To Buy

You need to be reminded everyday that if you want to be successful in your sales career you need to stop selling and start getting your customers to buy. Jeffrey Gitomer’s famous tag line “People hate to be sold, but they love to buy” should be tattooed to the back of your hand so you can see it every day.

Selling is a very social experience. You know when it is right to push and when it will do no good to honk the guy in front of you. Don’t let “needing the sale” take away your ability of gaining a loyal customer in the future. Take the time to get to know your prospect or customer and find out what they think they need and why they need it. Questions of course are the way to go.

1. Find out from your clients why they use your product or your competitor’s product. Find out how that product benefits the buyer personally.

2. Find out what he really wants out of his job, why he can’t make the move now.

3. What you need to do is find out all that you would if you were interviewing an employee or in actuality your new boss.

Also, don’t be afraid of some Yes or No questions once in a while, followed by a “Why”, you will love to use them too once you have a big pipeline of prospects. Yes or No questions will clean the deck and save tons of time in trying to fit a customer into your sales system. If you are willing to accept a No as really meaning “Not Now” you will feel much more comfortable with any answer.

Remember your customers want to be treated with respect and humanity. They don’t want to be tricked or played. They would stop for some geese too…don’t honk when they can’t move.

Click here, for more resources to help your sales career.

Dan Jourdan
		About the author:
		For the past decade, DAN JOURDAN has served as a trusted advisor and consultant to numerous businesses. In addition to being a professional speaker, Dan is a managing partner of Neighborhood Business Brokers, where he works with business owners from all types of industries to help facilitate sales and acquisitions. Dan has become recognized as an authority on the assessment and valuation of small businesses and successful practices of entrepreneurs. .