Blog

All companies want customers who stay, buy more, and tell others how great it is to do business with them.  But great companies create great customers.  How do they do that?  It takes a thoughtful approach and a lot of work, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.  I believe three pillars support a loyal customer base: innovation, performance, and service.

1. Innovation

One sure way to erode your customer base is to take them for granted and stop innovating for them.  Great companies use innovation not only to attract new customers, but also to keep current customers dazzled.  When was the last time you offered a new way of doing things that made life easier for your customers?  How about a new process that saves them time and money?  There’s a growing tendency for companies to try and upsell us at every turn.  It’s irritating unless it seems more advantageous for us than them.  Great companies roll out offerings that help customers, not slightly fixed versions with more promotion than substance.  

2. Performance

You have to keep performing to keep your customers.  So you got a big contract and life is good, right?  Then inevitable issues occur with production quality and delivery issues.  If you want to stay in the game you quickly have to find the problems, resolve them, and make sure you’re back on track.  Great companies obsess over performance metrics.  A former boss often observed that when you continually measure something, the trend improves.  Your customer base will reward you for great performance.  It’s tied to the Basking in Reflected Glory effect, where we identify with the success of others we associate with.  Everyone loves a winner.

3. Service

Customer service is essential to supporting long-term customer relationships.  But great customer service won’t help unless you also innovate and perform.  It’s like working with a disgruntled customer.  You can’t begin to fix them until you understand them and know the details of their issue.  Another way to look at this is that your customer service staff shouldn’t be the only people on your team helping customers.  That’s like no one but the goalie in a hockey game playing defense.  You’ll get crushed.  And you’ll go through a lot of customer service reps.  Just as everybody on your team should be in sales, so should everybody on your team be in customer service. 

With innovation, performance, and service you can keep customers for life and turn them into sales associates. 

Two Essential Elements Needed to Expand Your Business

Unless you’re a business leader who’s satisfied with the size of your business, you want it to grow.  That means increasing your current offerings to existing and new customers or developing new offerings.  The most challenging of these scenarios, of course, is pursuing new customers with new offerings.  No matter which direction you wish to go as a business leader in adding to your top line, you’re going to need two essential elements to get the job done: people and processes.

1. People 

Get the Right People

Good business leaders realize that as their companies grow, they become more removed from things like hiring talent.  You have to delegate that authority.  Yet talent is so fundamental to business success that each new hire has a direct impact and you need to have a system in place to insure you get the right people.  There are many great aptitude assessments out there that can help.  A banking industry friend confided that he once made a hire on gut feeling alone and it was such a costly disappointment that he never made that same mistake again.  Also, in addition to other questions in your job interviews, assess candidates for how they would fit into your business culture.  Great talent that can’t integrate into the team is probably worse than if the rest of your team continues to work short-handed.

Get The Right Training

Talent without training is like an unguided missile.  It’s exciting to watch, but you don’t know where it’s going.  Many companies have programs for leadership development, compliance training, and technical training.  What continually surprises me is that many companies don’t have sales training for their business development groups.  Maybe they recommend sales books (there are thousands available), but selling involves skills and skills get better with instruction.  It’s been said many times that no one learned to play golf by reading a book.  I love golf even though I don’t have a natural talent for it.  I’ve never been so average at doing something and yet enjoying every moment of it.  But I’m getting better every game because I take lessons now and then and practice, practice, practice.  Business leaders who invest in good training programs for their salespeople get better results.

2. Processes

Get the Right Solutions

Okay, you want to grow your business and you get inspiration for a new solution.  You and your engineering staff come up with a great product design, name, and even a logo.  All that’s needed are customers.  So you tell your sales staff to go out and sell.  And not much happens.  So you fire the sales staff and send out new salespeople.  And not much happens.  Your instinct is to blame customers who don’t appreciate your brilliant product.  You’d be half right in that they don’t appreciate it.  The reality is that value is in the eyes of the customers, not in the eyes of your designers.  Next time, try starting with customer needs and desires when designing new offerings.  Give your salespeople something great to sell.

Get the Right Messages Out

You can have a talented and trained workforce and great solutions, but if you can’t get the right messages out to your customers it’s all for naught.  It’s amazing how a few, well-constructed phrases can make all the difference.  Are your salespeople giving your customers the right amount of information in a way that’s easy for them to understand?  Are the claims in your messages of value to your customers?  Are your key messages unique to you so your customers can see how much better your offerings are compared to your competitors?  If you can’t answer ‘yes’ to all three questions, challenge your sales and marketing people to work together until you can.  Then watch the orders tick up.

Have you ever been in a company sales meeting and come out of it not knowing what to do?  Perhaps you thought it was your fault.  Sure, you were wistfully thinking of fish tacos and a cold Painkiller at a Caribbean Beach Bar and missed some essential elements, but more likely it was the business leader’s fault for assuming the sales team could make sense of all the charts and graphs without a close for action.

I remember a lengthy business development meeting on a complex defense sale that had been in progress for years.  The opportunity was finally ripening.  We knew the customer.  We knew the competition.  We had a great solution.  We had a great team.  What we didn’t have was a great action plan.  A lot of people were doing a lot of things, but none of our efforts were synchronized.  The operation was so big and it covered so many internal organizations that no one was truly in charge and able to say, “You go here now and you go there then.”  Without closing for action, we lost.

You’ve gotten a lead and are in discussion with a potential client group.  It’s going well.  You deliver a presentation and your last slide is the typical question mark.  You ask, “Do you have any questions?”  They say, “No.”  You thank them for their time.  Your meeting report says, “Presentation was well-received.  No questions.”  That’s good, right?  Wrong!  The customer wasn’t fully engaged and you didn’t have a way back in to see them.  If they don’t ask you for more information, task yourself and provide something extra in the nearest future.  Be a golden retriever.  Keep bringing the ball back until they love you.

Strong presentations have strong closings.  Every Hollywood producer and director knows you need to have a hot opening and a hot closing.  The middle is important, but not always that memorable.  You’re with a customer.  You’re comfortable with each other.  They have a need and you have a solution.  You’ve presented your program and all the great reasons why they should pick you.  At this point, my friends at Corporate Visions recommend asking, “What do you think?” and waiting quietly until they respond.  If you’ve done everything well and they’re comfortable with you, they’ll say something positive about your presentation.  Then you follow up with a second question, “Where do we go from here?” and wait again for their answer.  That’s your close for action.  Of course, if you don’t get a positive answer to the first question, be polite and be gone.

Closing for action can’t be addressed without mentioning the term – closing the sale.  You’ve seen Alec Baldwin’s classic rant “Always Be Closing” in the film Glengarry Glen Ross, right?  Don’t be that guy.  Yet the main idea that in sales you are, really, closing all the time is a good one, as long as you define it to be closing to the next step.  At Asher Strategies Close Deals Faster workshops, salespeople are encouraged to always close to the next step – to get a commitment for action from each customer at each meeting.  Like moving the chains in a football game.  You do that often enough and you score. 

Close for action in your sales meetings, customer meetings, presentations, and all through your customer engagements and you will increase your sales.  Case closed.

Customer intimacy.  An awkward phrase for something so vital to improving loyalty in your clients.  I was once introduced to an audience of business leaders with, “Here’s Dave Potts.  He has a passion for customer intimacy.”  Yuck. That still doesn’t sound right.

To some businesses, customer intimacy is a marketing strategy.  To others it’s implementation of loyalty programs.  And some think it’s a waste of time and money altogether.  I prefer to think of customer intimacy as an environment where you and the customer are as close as you can be in wishing for each other’s success.  

Customer intimacy should be the responsibility of everyone in the company – those who interact with the customers and those who support those interactions.  It doesn’t have to be overly scripted and costly.  I believe there are two essential components to customer intimacy: what you do and how you act.  Business people usually focus more on the first than the second.

1. What You Do (Physical Actions)

• Depth of Knowledge – Are you the one they can turn to for all the details?  Can you give them the exact information they want and need?
• Frequency of Contact – Do you stay in touch?  Do you know how often and by what means your customer wants you to contact them?
• Range of Coordination – Is your internal network of contacts wired solid?  Can you reach back into your company to get what your customer needs?
• Timeliness of Response – If there’s an issue, can you get them an answer quickly?  Do you give updates on the response if the answer is delayed?

2. How You Act (Personal Connections)

• Openness to Communication – Do you engage in conversations with your customers?  Are they comfortable talking with you?
• Willingness to Listen and Understand – When a customer speaks, do you hear opportunities or problems?  Potential solutions or objections?
• Projection of Respect and Trust – Do the words you use with customers convey appreciation for their business?  Do they feel they can count on you?
• Ease of Doing Business – Are you comfortable to work with?  Are your customers relaxed around you?  Happy to see you?

What you do is very important to customer intimacy.  Every transaction you have is evaluated in the customer’s mind as either correct or incorrect in details.  But at the same time, customers are sensing if the transaction is good or bad for them personally.  The details are vital, but the emotions rule.

More attention to these two customer intimacy components can better address both the customer’s technical and emotional needs and can lead to greater customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and customers unable to imagine a world without you and your company in it.

Whether you’re connecting with potential customers for the first time or revisiting current customers, don’t forget about their cultures.  Many things are in play when you interact with people, including their positions, personalities, generations, etc.  It’s easy to overlook the influence of cultures.  They seem to operate in the background, like coding in software that controls how you communicate with programs.  Let’s look at three important categories of customer culture:

1. National

This is fairly obvious.  People who grow up in different cultures likely have different perspectives on life in general and business in particular.  I lived in Korea for a couple of years and learned that in many Asian cultures saying no is more nuanced than Americans are used to.   A mentor advised me that a good approach was to “never take yes for an answer.”  You need to keep discussing matters over an extended period, including social (drinking) gatherings, to get every issue out in the open.  I later worked with officers of the Royal Netherlands Air Force.  Minimal small talk, every important issue brought up in the first meeting – and then we went drinking and didn’t talk business at all.  

National culture considerations even help in domestic business development.  I wasn’t able to assist a business unit having difficulties with a Vietnamese-American US government program manager until we learned that he and his family were Vietnamese Boat People, refugees who fled Vietnam in 1975.  He had a difficult childhood.  Understandably, you had to work to get his trust; but once you had it, programs flourished.  Interestingly, his background was brought to our attention by an Egyptian-American on the team who devoted more time talking with him than the others did.  Cultural diversity can be a force multiplier in business.

2. Regional

In business development approaches, what plays in London may not play the same way in Liverpool.  What plays in Berlin may not play the same way in Bavaria.  And what plays in New York may not play the same way in Napa Valley.  Once I was sent out from the Washington Metro Area to Silicon Valley to discuss business development with a tech company my corporation had recently bought.  I showed up in a coat and slacks talking about long-cycle government contracts and they were in jeans and tee shirts wanting to talk about the short-cycle commission sales they were hired for.  It was a meeting that didn’t go well.  I wish I’d read this blog before that trip.  But it taught me a great lesson in regional cultural sensitivities.

3. Organizational

In his seminal work on the Cuban Missile Crisis, Harvard political scientist Graham Allison analyzed how US government agencies negotiated with each other over the response to the Soviets.  In describing the effect of organizations on stated positions, Allison wrote: “Where you stand depends on where you sit.”  In dealing with others, people tend to hold values favorable to their organizations above all others.

Those who work for government agencies, foreign and domestic, generally behave according to the culture of their organizations.  In a past blog, “Four Military Customer Cultures,” I commented on the cultural differences among four of our armed services.  All federal agencies are not the same and there’s a compelling need to tailor your business development approaches accordingly.  You shouldn’t try selling to NASA with the same pitch you’re giving to the State Department.  And vice versa.

In the commercial world, there are vast differences in organizational values and beliefs among companies even in the same market segment.  I recommend you focus on answers (and evidence) to the following questions: “Who do they say they are?”  “What do they say they do?” and “What do they say their customers value?”  Don’t forget that a few moments of research on the Internet before customer meetings may reward you with useful insights into their organizational cultures – and successful outcomes.