By Dave Kahle

Q. You have convinced me that spending time face-to-face with customers is the best use of my sales time.  How much of my week should I spend entertaining customers; taking them to lunch, ballgames, etc.?

Building Customer Relationships

A.  Great question.  Let me answer this is two ways.  First, spend as much time as you can interacting with your customers in social settings.  That means that you should try to have lunch with a customer every day.  You should entertain in the evening as often as your family, your boss, your life style and your budget will allow.

Having said that, here’s a second answer.  The issue has more to do with the quality of the time than it does the quantity of time.  You shouldn’t spend social time with a customer just to meet some quantity goal.  It’s not time for the sake of time; it’s time for the sake of some objective.  If, for example, you take the same customer out to lunch every week because the two of you are buddies, that’s not quality time.  If you take people out to lunch or to a ball game, and those people are minor players in an account, having little, if any, influence on the decision, that also is not quality time.

Instead, be thoughtful and strategic about the investment of your time in your customers.  Make a list of all the people who are important decision-makers or influencers in your “A” accounts.  Then, think about which of them do not know you very well.  This is a critical issue.  Remember, it’s less important that you know them, than it is that they know you.  If they feel like they know you and are comfortable with you, you will have significantly advanced the personal relationship and made it easier for them to do business with you.  So, your primary objective in spending social time with a customer is to have them become comfortable with you.  Your secondary objective is to get to know them better.

With that clearly in mind, identify those powerful people in your “A” accounts who should know you better, and try to spend social time with them.

If I found myself free for lunch on Tuesday, for example, I’d start at the top of the list, and invite my number one candidate.  If he/she couldn’t make it, I’d go to number two, and so on.  That way, I was always focusing on those individuals who were most strategically important.

The amount of entertaining by sales people has dwindled significantly in the last decade.  I recall one of my friends, a manufacturer’s rep who sold automotive components in Detroit, had an entertaining budget in excess of $80,000 annually.  And that was twenty years ago.

That sales person who is able to build real personal relationships with his/her customers will succeed where others fail.

While those days of lavish spending are in the past, it is, never-the-less, true that spending social time with a customer can be a powerful sales strategy.  In my days as a field sales person, I would take two or three customers and their spouses out to dinner at Greektown in Detroit, followed by a Tiger game.  My spouse would join me, and we would have six or eight people together for the evening.  We never talked business, but business in those accounts always grew afterward.  It was because they got to know me on a personal basis.  I met their spouses, and they mine.  We came to know one another as real people, not just people playing the role of buyer and seller.  As a result of forging this personal relationship, it was easier for us to do business together.

That is still true today, perhaps even more so.  As more and more business is done electronically, people hunger for the high-touch of personal relationships that has been excluded by high-tech communications.  That sales person who is able to build real personal relationships with his/her customers will succeed where others fail.

We have some resources to help you with this.  You may want to consider the book, “Take Your Sales Performance Up-a-Notch,” or the CD set entitled, “The Essential Secrets of Building Positive Business Relationships”.

If you are a member of The Sales Resource Center ™, consider Cluster CL-15, “Entertaining your customers,” or Pod-2: “Building Positive Business Relationships.”

Image owned by gareth1953 (cc)

About the Author:

Dave Kahle is one of the world’s leadng sales educators. He’s written nine books, presented in 47 states and seven countries, and has helped enrich tens of thousands of sales people and transform hundreds of sales organizations.  Sign up for his free weekly Ezine, and visit his blog.  For a limited time, receive $547 of free bonuses with the purchase of his latest book, How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime.

Copyright MMXI by Dave Kahle

All Rights Reserved.

By Dave Kahle

No one looks forward to an encounter with an angry or difficult customer.  Most of us can’t help but feel emotionally impacted by an upset customer.  An ugly incident can ruin our entire day.

Not only that, but there is usually some damage that can be done to the company by the angry customer.  Our job security is not enhanced when the company loses business.  Put those two things together, and you can see that dealing effectively with an angry customer becomes a challenge that we must overcome.

Here are some tips to make your next confrontation easier for you, better for your company, and much more satisfying to the customer.

1.    Don’t take it personally.

Unless you were personally involved in the incident that caused the customer’s anger, the customer probably isn’t angry with you.  He’s angry with your company, and he’s angry with the consequences that impact him.  There is no reason that you should take it personally.  You are just the current expression of your company, the most convenient representative.

When you take the customer’s anger personally, it’s so much easier to become defensive and argumentative.  And when that happens, the net effect is to turn a bad situation into something even worse.  When you are tempted to react in kind, emotionally, just tell yourself that this is not about you.

2.   Listen.

That is often enough to turn a customer’s attitude around. It is amazing how powerful an empathetic, active listener can be.  When you sincerely and actively listen, that calms the customer down, it shows him that you are interested, it gives some credence to his/her position, and, it gives you some information and time to think. A magic elixir!

3.   Empathize.

If you were the customer, and this thing had happened to you, how would you feel?  Wouldn’t you also be upset?

Empathizing doesn’t take much effort on your part, and it has a powerful impact on a tense situation.  When you empathize with the customer by letting him know that you understand how he feels, you release much of the tension out of the situation.  Picture a balloon that you have blown up almost to the point of bursting.  There is tremendous tension inside the balloon pushing outward.  But when you open the bottom, and let some of that pressure out, the balloon relaxes.  Same thing when you empathize with the customer.  Picture yourself letting air out of the bottom of that balloon.

4.   Apologize.

This sometimes seems like too little, too late.  Regardless, it’s the minimum acceptable response.  If your customer has been wronged, or thinks that he or she has been wronged, apologizing for your company is the least you can do.  If you are afraid of admitting responsibility, then let the customer know that you are sorry this thing happened to him.  That’s generally enough to not accept any responsibility, and still convey a message of concern.

5.   Don’t blame.

No one cares who is at fault.  No one really cares that so-and-so in inventory control didn’t order enough inventory, or that the picking clerk incorrectly picked the order, or any one of a thousand other possible mistakes that other people may have made.  Blaming someone emphasizes that you are more concerned with yourself than you are with making things right with the customer.  It emphasizes the past (what happened), instead of the future (what you can do to fix this.)

Blame is the first response of a small person.  Don’t show yourself to be in that league by immediately jumping to blame someone.

6.   Ask.

Always ask something of the customer.  By asking, you show your interest in the customer, indicate that you really do want to understand, and give the customer an opportunity to describe their situation.  Ask about the details, ask about the situation, ask what the customer would like to see as a solution.  Don’t worry about asking the wrong thing.  Almost any question in that situation is going to have a positive impact on the customer.  No matter what, ask.

7.   Promise accurately.

The worst thing you can do is make some grandiose or unfounded promise to fix the customer’s problem, and then not follow through on it.  Or make a promise on behalf of your company, and then discover that your company is not able to meet the terms of your promise.

By doing that, you’ve fed the customer’s frustration and added fuel to an already hotly burning fire.  It is far better to not promise anything than it is to jump to a hasty and unfounded promise.

8.   Deliver more.

Here’s an opportunity to turn the customer around.  Deliver more than what you promise.  If you say you’ll have a replacement to him on Friday, try to get it there on Wednesday.  If you say you’ll replace that gallon of paint with a free gallon, throw in an extra brush. A little something above and beyond what you promise is a great way to say that you are sorry for the previous inconvenience, and leave the customer with a good feeling about the encounter with you and your company.

9.   If possible, follow up.

To this day, I remember a hotel calling back the day after I rented a small conference room to ask if everything had been acceptable.  That follow-up call was eighteen years ago, but I still remember the powerful, positive impact it made on me.  Someone cared enough to call after the fact and determine that I had been satisfied.  What a concept!

Your follow up call can have the same effect.

A difficult and angry customer is one of the most intense challenges you’ll face.  Implement these nine tips and watch yourself grow in confidence as you expertly handle these hot situations.

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If you’d like some additional help with this thorny issue, check out a variety of resources at http://www.davekahle.com/difficult_customers.html.  If you are a subscriber to The Sales Resource Center, check out Cluster CL-12: Abusive Customers, Cluster CL-17: Dealing with Difficult Customers, and Pod-15:  How to Skillfully Handle Difficult Customers.

About the Author:

Dave Kahle is one of the world’s leading sales educators. He’s written nine books, presented in 47 states and seven countries, and has helped enrich tens of thousands of sales people and transform hundreds of sales organizations.  Sign up for his free weekly Ezine, and visit his blog.  For a limited time, receive $547 of free bonuses with the purchase of his latest book, How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime.

Image Credit: by Molumen source openclipart license Public Domain. Free images from acobox.com

Smart businesses are now implementing CRM business software to capture, manage and share information about their customers with departments throughout the organization. The objective is to ensure that everyone who interacts with the customer has access to the information they need to effectively do their jobs.

CRM has now become a strategy for customer retention. CRM systems traditionally enable you to capture information about your customers and improve sales execution by helping you manage the sales cycle. More mature CRM systems now incorporate Customer Service functionality that allow you to maintain a complete history of every customer transaction, including what they purchased, when they purchased, the sales representative they purchased from and notes that describe if the transaction and delivery went smoothly. This information is tied to the account or company record thereby providing all authorized staff with a complete 360 degree view of the customer’s purchase history and buying experience. Having this information immediately available to both sales and customer service personnel is vital to providing high quality service because it enables the staff to react quickly if the customer’s experience was not what they expected. In addition, businesses are beginning to utilize this information to separate high profit customers from low profit ones, analyze re-order history and predict future buying patterns and revenue.

Another strategy that is taking shape with CRM is that of providing customer self service. CRM vendors refer to this as a customer portal. The portal enables customers to update their profile, check the status of an order or simply access a knowledgebase of information that is available anytime and anywhere via an internet connection. For companies that operate globally, the customer self service portal has proven to be an efficient vehicle for providing world-class service while reducing the cost associated with maintaining staff around the clock.

While the traditional role of CRM has been clearly focused on contact management and sales force automation, several CRM vendors are taking CRM to the next level with customer service applications that help businesses put the customer first. One of the CRM providers moving in this direction is Commence Corporation. To learn more about Commence, see www.commence.com.

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Building brand recognition and lead generation at one time required a marketing mix of magazine advertisements, article placements, internet advertising, banner ads, public relations, joining industry specific trade groups, and more.  But things have changed and social networking also referred to as viral marketing mixed with search engine optimization, site linking, data mining and bulk e-mail campaigns have become today’s standard for building awareness and attracting new customers.  Mature CRM solutions incorporate marketing software programs and tools to automate many of these processes.  While many small to mid-size firms seem to overlook this critical component of CRM, it is the one area that can have the greatest impact for getting an edge over your competition.

Leading edge companies are also paying close attention to customer retention.  This may be because the cost of attaining new customers is significantly greater than retaining the ones your have.  Smart companies are looking to improve the customer’s buying experience and maximize the lifetime value of their business relationships by providing world class customer service before, during and after the sale.  Many are using CRM software to ensure that everyone within the organization has immediate access to the customer profile including what they purchased, when they purchased, the sales representative responsible for the sale, how the delivery went and if the customer is pleased with the product and the buying experience. This is the type of personalized service that drives customer loyalty.

If you are looking to move past the traditional contact management and sales forecasting stage for your business, this narrows down the selection of top rated quality CRM products and companies.  Commence Corporation has been helping small to mid-size businesses become more effective sales and service organizations.  The company’s award winning software provides the foundation for building brand awareness through automated marketing and lead generation programs while improving sales execution and customer service.  Experienced professionals offer the guidance, coaching, and CRM Best Practices that ensure that Commence customers realize the maximum value from the CRM software features.

Product Centric Strategy

To pursue a strategy of product leadership or product centricity involves delivering customer value through leading edge products and services.  This entails a continuous stream of new products and services, and creatively adapting to new and changing market conditions while constantly pursuing new solutions on behalf of clients and customers.

To do this effectively, the business needs to be very research and development centered and extremely knowledgeable about the products and services currently being developed and considered in the market place. Sales & Marketing needs to be closely tied to customers in order to teach them new approaches and solutions to their problems. This also requires the ability to direct customers into avenues they hadn’t entertained on their own about the use of new products and services.

Larger companies can execute this strategy more effectively than SMBs, because they have the resources to devote to research and development and also have larger sales, marketing and support organizations that are able to stay in touch with their customers.  The company’s personnel often act as advisors and consultants to their customers assuming the role of fitting their product to the customer’s needs.

Customer Centric Strategy

Customer intimacy or customer centricity entails precisely segmenting and targeting markets, acquiring detailed customer knowledge, developing an operational flexibility that allows for immediate response to customer needs, and securing customer loyalty. The value added component of this strategy is to attain intimate knowledge of the customer’s requirements or pain points and outlining a specific solution to address those requirements.

This strategy demands a very active marketing, sales and customer service department geared to relationship selling.  In fact, these departments drive the SMB’s business and are the company’s primary interface to prospects and the customer base.  As such, they need to continually solicit customer information, sort it, analyze it, and use to define a consistent message for all who interact with the customer.

One of the ways to capture, manage and share this vital customer information is through the use of Customer Relationship Management software (CRM).  Large organizations have been using CRM solutions for some time to automate and streamline the interaction between the company and the customer. The utilization however is mostly to gather contact management information about the customer and to use that information to drive and fine-tune the sales cycle.  The objective is to find creative ways to sell additional products and services to the customer by convincing the customer that there is a fit between their requirements and the products or service the sales representatives is selling.

While this is fine, in order to execute a customer centric strategy you need a CRM solution that is designed for customer collaboration. The CRM software must solicit not only geographic customer data, but also demographic data to help build a detailed picture of the “favorite” customer makeup.  In addition, the sales, customer service and any other personnel with customer contact need to be trained to solicit and collect psychographic and behavioral data that help define how and why the customer buys.

Social Networking

The rapid expansion and utilization of social networking can provide essential customer centric information for sales and marketing organizations.  Sites such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are being used by today’s businesses to communicate and interact with similar organizations. These conversations provide valuable insight into customer buying patterns, likes and dislikes and behavioral data. Best of all, you don’t have to be an enterprise company to access social media sites, capture and analyze information and produce a marketing message that fits the customer’s pain points and buying habits. What is important is that the SMB selects the right CRM platform which will enable them to directly link to these sites, capture the information and utilize it to gain a competitive edge.

Commence Corporation, a leading provider of cloud computing based CRM software, is taking a leadership position in this area and understands that the future of customer relationship management will be driven based on the collaboration and partnership with customers.  Commence is busy restructuring the data points that their system collects to include the needed demographic and psychographics data that CRM systems do not capture today.  Commence is also working to seamlessly interface the product with social media applications so that it can collect and analyze all of the different streams of customer conversations that are currently on the web, then use this information for targeting effective marketing campaigns.

Having the right business strategy in today’s challenging economy is critical for success.  A sound customer centric strategy gives you the ability to craft a company wide marketing message that is used by all to communicate your value not only to your current customer base, but also to those prospects that your sales team can readily qualify and close. To do this effectively, you need to select a CRM software provider that offers a platform that can support the customer collaboration that will need into take place in the future.

About the author: Larry Caretsky is the president of Commence Corporation, a leading provider of CRM software which can be deployed in a web-based, cloud-computing environment or on premise. Caretsky is considered an expert in Customer Relationship Management and has written numerous white papers on the subject, which may be accessed via the company’s web site at www.commence.com.

A standard approach to pursuing and tracking opportunities is a smart way to assure that all sales activities are aligned with organizational goals and the overall direction of sales management. Consistency also reduces the amount of non-value added sales activities such as drafting letters, writing reports, and having lengthy phone calls to determine what stage is next in a sales opportunity.  Having standard terminology saves time and minimizes confusion.

Sales managers benefit from standardized CRM Sales processes because it is also easier to determine how each salesperson is performing.  Opportunities that are stalled in one stage can be identified and resolved.  Salespeople benefit from standardization because they waste less time determining what information is missing and what the next step should be in the workflow. Sales appointments become more productive because they are only conducted when qualified as part of a planned sequence of events.

The high level steps to implement a sales process are:

1. Document your sales process
2. Design your implementation
3. Train your sales team
4. Support the implementation

Some companies adopt branded systems such as Sandler, Solution Selling, Dale Carnegie or others.  Others develop their own systems with distinct terminology; perhaps a hybrid of popular systems or a mix of the techniques used by the company’s most successful sales performers.

A standard sales process allows companies to more easily analyze events and make sense of trends. As a regional sales manager at a mid-sized organization observed, “The only way to discover what’s working and what’s not is to measure the individual steps of the sales process.  If you know the percentages of prospects that proceed through each stage of the process, you accurately predict how many sales will close in the future, based upon the current pipeline.  You can also compare the performance of team members and take appropriate action, like additional coaching, in order to ensure that the team remains productive.”

Applying Best Practices to Sales

Most organizations are not strangers to processes, systems, and re-engineering.  For example, in the manufacturing industry, plants and warehouses couldn’t operate profitably without them and no business manager would let accounting and purchasing departments improvise. The more complex the task, it’s more likely that the effective principles and processeses for successfully completing that task have been defined and codified.  In other words, much of the business world is already highly process-driven, systematized, and automated.

Yet, oftentimes, the sales department hasn’t been automated.  For example, in a recent study of distributor respondents, eighty-eight percent indicated that they do not have a documented, formal sales process.  Given that sales is fundamental and represents a large expense item, it was quite surprising that written sales processes were non-existent for the majority of the study participants.  Without such a document to provide a consistent road map, executives have no choice but to depend on the creativity, work ethic and luck of individual sales reps and their managers.

Organizations without a documented sales process often exhibit several common symptoms, such as a disconnected and manual approach to selling and a lengthy cycle time to find prospects, get quotes out the door, and close orders.  This may in turn lead to irritated prospects, who expect a rapid response to their inquiries or request for a proposal. .  In addition, top sales employees may become annoyed.  They want to sell, not figure out the best way to put prospects in the pipeline, create quotes, enter orders   and track shipments delivered. Other symptoms of process deficiencies include abundant and costly errors, evidenced by expedited orders and high volumes of returns, and inadequate margin on too many quotes, resulting in deflated profitability.  This may lead to stagnant sales from the most important customers and cause engineering and other departments to be pulled into disarray when the sales team gets a request for proposal or learns about a bid opportunity.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.  Many executives voice issues similar to these, yet the remedy seems to be incredibly difficult.  Sales teams are often extremely autonomous, and management struggles to avoid “big brother” accusations and micromanaging.  Despite these legitimate concerns, it is not that difficult to successfully implement a standard sales process.

When reviewing the various sales methodologies and processes available, make sure your final selection is repeatable, predictable, and scalable.  What you want is a sales process that is simply enough that, over time, it will become second nature to the sales staff. Also, make sure that it isn’t too complicated, or the sales team will not use it.

The elements of a sales process typically include:

• a common vocabulary for describing the activities involved in selling
• clearly defined stages of selling
• an agreed upon checklist of what it takes to move from one stage to the next
• consistent guidelines for information to be gathered and given at each stage
• clear expectations for how long each sales stage should take
• concise definition of suggested next actions

When smart organizations are designing a sales process implementation, they focus on change management, not sales training.  By implementing a formalized sales process, businesses are fundamentally changing the way people do their jobs on a daily basis.  There will be natural resistance.  To develop a change management plan, make sure you can answer the following questions:

• What motivation do sales people have to use the new system?
• What potential barriers are there to implementation?
• How can I overcome those barriers?
• How will I know if the implementation is successful?
• What should I expect during the transition?
• Who can people go to if they have questions?

Follow the Leader

One of the best ways to make sure implementations “stick” is to have the management involved.  One recent study found that when sales training is reinforced by management, the sales skills taught during training produced a 15% permanent increase in productivity.

Management needs to be involved in more than a cosmetic fashion.  A senior member of the management team needs to attend the training, and this same manager should inspect the sales activities for a period of time to make sure they continuously are consistent with the new sales introduced during the training.

At the end of the day, the challenge with adopting a new sales process is getting everyone to follow it.  Sales management must lead by example in sales meetings and on sales calls.  An automated workflow reinforced by a CRM system that quickly prompts a salesperson to enter required information before moving to the next sales stage is invaluable. Standard reports and online visibility into the sales pipeline can help monitor the progress of opportunities over time so that both the salesperson and the sales manager can spot when an opportunity is stalled.

As one sales leader summed up his company’s recipe for success: “Our company can’t grow consistently unless the sales process is repeatable, not arbitrary.  For us, it is a condition of employment – you have to embrace the standards, follow the processes and use the CRM system.”

About Commence Corporation: Founded in 1988, Commence develops and delivers a diverse suite of award winning CRM software that integrates people, processes and technology.  Available on-premise or online, Commence CRM solutions are utilized by several thousand businesses to streamline sales and customer service front office business processes.  As a result, Commence clients increase workforce productivity, generate positive customer interactions and reduce operational cost.

I am delighted to invite you to follow Commence Corporation on Twitter and on our new Commence Blog. More and more businesses and individuals are relying on social networking to convey and receive information quickly and simply. Commence’s new social networking presence via blog postings and “tweets” will enable us to enhance our communication and build closer relationships with customers. Whether it’s the latest news on our flexible suite of award-winning CRM products or news in the sales and customer service industries, Commence looks to educate and inform our customers.

Commence’s Twitter followers were the first to know about our new drip marketing functionality. The newest version of Commence OnDemand, a flexible, Web-based hosted CRM solution, now enables marketing teams to automate, and schedule the delivery of text-based or HTML-based e-mail marketing campaigns. Commence understands that companies are being challenged to do more with less. Commence OnDemand’s breadth of functionality – such as our new drip marketing capabilities – makes it the ideal solution for small to medium-sized businesses that want to have one system that manages CRM, sales and marketing. By following us on Twitter or at our blog, you’ll be among the first to learn about product enhancements and industry news.

Larry Caretsky, Chief Executive Officer

Image Credit: by Tstilz source Wikimedia license Public Domain from acobox.com