Pay for Play

This is an excerpt from an article in current Manufacturing & Technology e-Journal. It is dead on and against many current trends. Individual performance must be rewarded (in keeping with actual results) or you take the heart from your people. I suggest that not only the sales force should be compensated according to their results but your customer service team as well. It is so do-able. Write me and I will explain.

Enjoy reading Not everybody gets a Trophy:

Ken Blanchard once wrote: “There is nothing so unequal as the equal treatment of unequal’s.” It holds true in your Sales organization as well. Yes, you are a team, and yes, you need to be acting in the organization’s best interest. But the second you start to water down somebody’s earning potential is the second you lose their best effort. Let’s face it, with a few noble exceptions; most of us are out to take care of ourselves and our families first and foremost – we want to believe our future is brighter than our past. Fourth Quarter 2009 statistics show that 1 out of 4 people have updated resumes or are networking to find the next best thing. Most will continue to work hard because unemployment numbers remain above 10 percent. But you will never realize their full potential. Push them to perform - and reward them for it.

You need to be in the business of rewarding results, not effort.

Read the rest of the article

The Secret to Winning Back Customers

This artilcle was written by
Chris Lytle, Monster Contributing Writer

I thought it worth reprinting here;

There's a difference between lost customers and dead customers. Most sales managers and salespeople don't make that distinction, but Jill Griffin does in her book Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers -- and Keep Them Loyal.

In the rush to get new business, we ignore lost business. Marketing Metrics, a Paramus, New Jersey-based consulting firm, estimates that the closing ratio for new prospects is 5 percent to 20 percent. The potential for winning back lost customers is 20 percent to 40 percent. Here are five ideas for creating your own customer win-back program:

1. Sales Management Must Drive the Win-Back Program

It's unacceptable to give the lost causes and hopeless cases to the new salesperson. Sales managers have to identify the lost list and get out of the office and visit them with their sales reps. During those meetings, sales management's job is to listen, take notes and summarize the lost customers' comments to demonstrate they are understood.

2. Establish the Measurement System for Tracking Losses and Win Backs

Sales management needs a system for identifying lost and recovered business. If you're not measuring lost customers month to month, you're not managing churn. Identifying which customers who did business with you last month are not doing business with you now is vital for beginning your win-back program. Request a free copy of a Churn Calculation Worksheet.

3. Create a Strategy for Revisiting the Lost

Your win-back strategy might include a meeting with top management, a letter from the CEO and a new needs analysis meeting. This all flows from the first face-to-face meeting where you discover the problem and refine your approach.

4. Celebrate Your Win Backs

Make sure the salesperson who wins a customer back gets recognition for that sale. What gets rewarded gets done.

5. Document Your Successes

Winning back customers is a process, and it should be a repeatable one. It may take seven steps instead of the previous four, but once you've won back several customers, you'll begin to see patterns. The last thing you should do is document the steps that work and make them part of your training program going forward.

As you can probably tell, prevention is easier than the cure. Manage customer expectations at the beginning of the relationship, not the end. Ask, "What result are you looking for in the next quarter (or appropriate time period) that will make you continue to do business with us?" Knowing the expectations at the beginning makes your life as a salesperson much easier and increases your chances of renewing a client.

It's not easy to win back lost customers. There may be some confrontation, and you will undoubtedly hear things you don't want to hear. However, it's hard to correct a problem you're not willing to discuss. According to George Walther in his book Upside Down Marketing, the easiest sources of new business are customers who got frustrated, aggravated or annoyed and can be seduced away by the competition.

So why are you sitting there reading this? Go talk to a lost customer.

The Current Opportunity

The Bible says "to he that is faithful in little, much will be given". That is a truth that is universal. When we hold ourselves and our services out to the people we are targeting - the opportunity and our services sometimes do not match.

Have you ever had a potential customer call and ask for something you don't really do? If you just say "we don't deal in that" you are missing an opportunity to partner with your customer. Do a little research and find someone to direct them to. A call back to the buyer saying..."I checked around and everyone seems to like XYZ....here is their number." will be remembered when your email blitz or your phone campaign is forgotten.

Help anytime you can....not just when you have nothing else to do and maybe "much" will be on the way.

Earning Customer Loyalty

This is a reprint of an article I wrote for the "MHEDA Edge"

In the late 1960s, I stormed into the office of Ed Quintana, then the owner of Cisco Material Handling in Dallas, Texas. Ed was my boss and I was venting to him. I had drawn a layout for a warehouse operation where I had saved a considerable amount of space for a customer only to have them push out my ideas to everyone for competitive bids. I told Ed I was going to start charging for my layout work. He replied, “Good luck with that.”

That part of the business has not changed. Material handling dealer salespeople study their customers’ operations and make suggestions only to see others sell the products that bring those suggestions to life. It is not right, but it is not going to change.

At the heart of the problem is that the enduser does not see or understand your stake in their business. They aren’t loyal to you, because you haven’t sufficiently shown them why they should be. Through the years, I have had a lot of good customers and a few great customers and I wondered what made the great ones so great? Why couldn’t I earn their loyalty back then? Why can I now?

To find the answer, I started by looking back at how I started off as a salesman. In the beginning: I was not an expert at what I talked about to them. Many times I was just a brochure delivery boy. Too many times in my early career, I had nothing to add to the conversation once I handed over the literature.

Many times I realized (too late) that the product I proposed didn’t really fit the application. I just wanted to sell something and move on to the next deal. I really did not understand the customer’s problem. I had an idea, but not a true understanding. I hadn’t studied it. I wasn’t able to think outside the box because I hadn’t examined the box closely enough. I worried too much about the competition.What were they bidding? Was their solution cheaper than mine? How much can I cut? I should’ve been focusing on what I could bring to the table.

5 Keys to Earning Customer Loyalty

I wish that I could say that overnight I changed my thinking and started cashing big checks. The truth is, that didn’t happen right away. However, with the help of some good teachers and a willingness to learn on my part, I was able to develop a high-quality, loyal customer base. The following are five lessons that enabled me to do so:

1. Study problems before you develop solutions. Sometimes, the customer calls and says, “I need a particular product; get me a price.” It is hard to be expert there, but it can be done. Listen to what your customer wants, but also use your own expertise to determine if what they want is what is best for them.

2. Study products. Knowledge is paramount. Read everything you can find about the products that you sell. Talk to your customers’ employees. Find out what has worked for them and what hasn’t. Many times the customer thinks he needs to come up with the solution rather than rely on you. That shouldn’t be the case. You need to have a broad knowledge of your inventory before you can truly be a collaborative partner.

3. Make suggestions about process or safety before you are asked. Send a written outline of a problem or a potential danger you see in their operation. Offer a solution complete with a cost. Just because someone doesn’t ask you for a quote doesn’t mean they will not consider one.

4. Operate the way your customer asks of you. Technology has us communicating many different ways, but the customer gets to pick which one to use. If they prefer e-mail, but you’re a face-to-face guy, you’re going to have to type away.

5. Look at the seams. In any operation, a great deal of time and money is spent on systems and process. Many, if not most, of those are package deals and work the way they are designed. It is where one process intersects another that there is opportunity for a smart salesperson. Sometimes the gains are in fewer rejected parts or safety issues or wear on equipment. Most of the time, it is a problem the customer has decided he just has to live with. If you can fix that, you open yourself up to a world of possibilities.

If you can turn yourself into a worthy partner in your customer’s business, if he thinks that you are truly interested in his success, you will find that he roots for you. He finds ways for you to win because that is what you have done for him.

Sales & Customer Service in the BtoB World

Two separate things or just different ends of a process? I have been selling in the industrial market since the "sixties" (yes, I remember them). Material handling mostly with a couple of years retail back in the "seventies". I maintain that sales and customer service is a circle...a flywheel that develops a momentum when done properly.

My perspective has come from being;

• part-time invoice clerk
• full-time office worker
• office manager
• inside sales person
• outside sales person
• start-up business owner
• general manager
• managing partner in a merged business
• sales and marketing manager of a manufacturing company
• member of the management team of a US manufacturer

I have watched my sales and the sales of those around me rise and fall for many different reasons. Among them;

• good and poor economies
• good and bad business plans
• brilliant and stupid business plans
• changes in markets and channels
• changes in technologies, products and processes

In the posts to come on this site I hope to outline good practices and explain how the "fly-wheel" effect works for a lifetime. The purpose is to improve, to become better. To become excellent.