“What are you talking about Dave?  Qualifying is the job of sales, why are you talking about customers qualifying opportunities?”  It’s absolutely correct, one of the most critical success factors in sales is qualification.  Sales people need to viciously disqualify opportunities that aren’t in their sweet spot.  It may be a real deal, but it’s not your deal–so don’t waste time on it.

But I think sales people need to go further–I think sales people need to hold the customer accountable for qualifying the opportunity—is it real for them?

If we’re doing our jobs as sales people, we’re identifying lots of opportunities to improve their business, to help them grow.  Customers may want to do a lot of things.  They may be interested in engaging us on to discuss solutions.  But wanting to do something is different than having the ability to do something.  Customers need to qualify themselves—sales people need to help them.  Do they really have the ability to drive the change.

There lots of things that could cause a customer to disqualify themselves.  It may be something they want to do, but they have higher priorities.  Their organizations may not have the ability to do it–they need to focus on their readiness first.  It may be critical to them and their function, but it’s not important enough to the organization overall–they may have other priorities or strategic initiatives that take precedence.  They may not have the risk profile necessary to successfully manage the change.  The reasons can go on.

As sales people we can’t answer these issues for the customer and qualify them.  They have to challenge themselves on these issues.  Customers may not know how to do this, they may not even know they must do this.  After all, they may not buy these solutions that frequently, so while they may have the desire to change, the interest in doing something; they may not have the ability to do it.

It’s important to guide the customer through these discussions.  We don’t want to waste our time in  pursuing something that won’t happen–regardless of how compelling our case is.  We don’t want the customer’s expectations to be raised inappropriately–then dashed because they discover they can’t go forward.

Qualification is not just something sales people do.  It’s a shared responsibility, customers have to qualify the opportunity–their ability to do something (more than their willingness), and their desire to work with us in assessing the opportunity.

Are you helping your customer do the right job of qualification?

Related posts:

1. Customers Don’t Know What They Don’t Know
2. Our Customers Need To Do A Better Job Of Buying!
3. Those Damn Customers Just Get In The Way Of Doing Business!

As sales people, we work with customers every day.  We see them, we’re in their offices, we talk to them.  They’re very real (sometimes too real) to us.  Customers–each of them—are very important to us.  Sometimes, it’s frustrating, people in our companies don’t seem to be as customer focused as we are.

Many of the people we work with aren’t as sensitive to customers as we are.  Part of it is they are busy doing their jobs, part of it may be they may not understand how what they do impacts the customer experience, part of it is simply that the customer is probably an abstract concept to them.

We talk about customers in our organizations all the time, but we refer to them as faceless entities, “General Motors,” “Bank Of America,” “IBM,” “Verizon,” or Company XYZ.  It’s hard for us to relate to an entity, but that’s how all of us tend to talk about customers.  These are entities without a personality.  We never talk about Bill, Sue, Joe, Lauren, Amir, or Deborah.  People within our companies don’t know how Robin is using our products and why they are important to her.  Or how the results produced through our services bailed Jim out, making him a hero to his customers.

It’s magic how people’s attitudes toward the customer change when they can put a face to the customer.  When the customer is transformed from an account or an entity to a real live human being, it’s hard not to be concerned with the customer.  When you know who the customer–the individual—is, what she looks like, what he’s responsible for, how our products help her do her job, the relationship changes.  It’s not a faceless entity, but an individual trying to do his or her job, trying to achieve their goals, trying to reach their dreams–and they need our products to do this.

Walk into a truly customer centric company and you see the “faces” of customers everywhere.  Their pictures and stories are in the halls, conference rooms are named after customers (individuals not entities), customers are invited to participate in meetings, there always seems to be a customer visiting and talking to people in the company.

In reviews and meetings, they talk about customers as people.  Rather than saying “we saw this when we visited XYZ Corp,”  customer centric companies say “Jill at XYZ Corp has a problem doing this, I’ve seen Dean at ABC, and Yuegang at DEF have the same issues….”  When we make decisions, we know the impact on Robert, Kelly, and Juan.

Want to be more customer focused?  Then put a face to your customers.  Rather than talking about corporations and entities, talk about people.  Celebrate the customer with pictures and stories in your halls and conference rooms, invite them to visit you.  Talk about them in your meetings.  You’ll be amazed at how attitudes change.

No related posts.

Lauren Harper posed an interesting question at Focus.com:  “As a sales rep, how do you ensure your clients don’t get buyer’s remorse?”  It struck me as a key issue sales professionals overlook.

Think about it, during the sales process, we put on our best face, focusing on the customer, their needs, trying to create value, aligning with their buying process, helping them solve their problem.  Success, we get the order, we thank the customer, then we’re off to the next thing, another deal, another order.  After all, we achieved our goal, an order!

That’s where we go wrong, that’s where our real motivations are shown and we betray the customer.  During the customer buying process, we are focused on solving their problem, we are absolutely aligned with the customer.  Once we get the order, our job isn’t over–because the customer’s job isn’t over.  They still haven’t solved their problem.  They have just made a decision about the solution, but they still have to solve their problem.  If we abandon them, or change how we are engaging them, after we get the order–the customer recognizes that. 

The customer realizes that we weren’t really trying to help them solve their problem, that we only were interested in the order.  They begin to wonder, rightfully so, they may have made the wrong decision.

It’s important to realize that we sold a solution to the customer’s problem—so the sale isn’t over until the customer has solved their problem!  If the sales person disappears after receiving the order, then the customer has right to be remorseful even angry.  If it’s a customer we want to be able to sell to again, then we’ve made our job more difficult–as much as we claim we are customer focused, that we want to help them solve their problem, their past experience shows them what we really care about is the order, the rest is just positioning to get the order.

The sales process doesn’t stop until the customer solves their problem and achieves the goals they had hoped to achieve.  As sales professionals, it’s our job to start setting the expectations of what will be done during the sales process, whether it’s an implementation plan, introducing the customer to the people that will be supporting them after the order, or something else.  Immediately after the order (and thanking the customer for it), the sales person has to lay out the next steps and set the expectations.  The role of the sales person may diminish, but it’s never over.  Afterall, it’s the sales person that the customer has the principal relationship with.

The sales person should always follow up through the implementation process, and even after it’s completed.  Is the customer achieving what they expected?  Do we need to do something else?  Are they satisfied?  Do we need to take any corrective action?

If we position ourselves as selling solutions, if the customer is buying because we have committed to solve their problem, then the selling process does not end with the order.  It only ends when the customer has achieved their goals.  Even then, it doesn’t stop–if we have helped them achieve success, we will want to explore what’s next.  They will be enthusiastic in doing this if we have worked with them in the implementation.

Related posts:

1. Leaping To Solutions! Are We Solving The Right Problem?
2. Being Helpful To Customers Must Be For Profit!
3. Your Customers Know What You Value, Do You?

Usually it’s easier, and cheaper to sell to a current customer than to acquire a new customer.  Monitoring customer retention and customer attrition is important.  Ideally, 100% of our customers continue to see superior value in our products and services, and want to continue to be customers.

There are a number of different ways to measure customer retention.  In the simplest form, you want to look at the percent of customers that bought in some previous time period that buy this year.  For example (Customers Buying This Year That Also Purchased Last Year)/(Customers That Bought Last Year) expressed as a percentage.

For some businesses, it’s worthwhile to look at this over a longer period of time.  For example, in my business, we have very high customer retention, but not all our clients buy our types of services every year.  Consequently, we monitor this over a several year period.

Having high customer retention numbers is good, it’s an indicator of customer loyalty.  There are some I think are better, or complement Customer Retention–Net Promoter Score is one I like a lot.  But what’s most interesting about customer retention is actually the inverse–the past customer that you have lost.  It’s called Customer Attrition.  It’s past customers that are choosing to buy from someone else.

It’s always critical to understand why customers abandon you.  Were they unsatisfied with your products/services?  Were they unhappy with quality?  Did they believe they could get a better deal from someone else?  Did they feel forgotten, or that service did not meet their expectations?  Without understanding why you are losing customers, you don’t know what it takes to improve, how to retain more customer or how to grow the relationship.

We’ve done a lot of analysis about Customer Attrition.  Our clients are always surprised, one of the surprising, but major reasons customer don’t buy again has nothing to do with their satisfaction with the product, quality, service, or price.  We find a surprisingly large number of past customers simply saying, “We forgot to buy!”

“We forgot to buy!”  It’s a terrible reason to lose customers, it’s sales error!  It’s always important to keep in touch with customers, to make sure they are satisfied with what they have bought, to assure they are achieving the results they need, to build the relationship, to give them more ideas about how they can extend the use of the current products they are buying or to buy more.  We need to continue to call on them, we need to continue to communicate and teach them, we need to make our relationship an important component of their success.

Are your measuring retention and attrition?  Are you understanding why customers continue to buy and why they stop?  Are you taking action based on what you’ve learned?

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Wallet Share
2. Performance Management Friday — % Leads Converted To Opportunities
3. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures

I was reading an interesting discussion on customer loyalty at Focus.com.  The responses focused on great customer service.  This matches my experience when I talk to executives worldwide.  It’s what most customers cite when questions about how they make buying decisions.

Sometimes, I wonder if all of us, customers included are missing the point.  Don’t get me wrong, customer service is critical, but I wonder if there is something that’s really more important.

What if we designed products, services, buying experiences that didn’t need customer service?

How could I as a customer be truly delighted?  If I’m buying a new software product, I don’t want to have to call some technical support center to help me solve installation/implementation problems–I want it to work out of the box.  I really don’t care about well trained, courteous customer service reps in dealing with my mobile phone problems, I don’t want problems.

Fundamentally, as a customer (B2B or B2C) I don’t want to be forced to discover how wonderful your customer service is.  I want an extraordinary buying and usage experience.  In a perfect world, I’d like to totally avoid the need to use customer service.

A number of months ago, I was looking at buying a new car.  One of the key things the sales people did (based on the manufacturer’s training) was to focus on their customer service department.  They took me on a tour, had me meet the customer service manager and all the agents that would be handling me when I would bring the car in.  They showed me sparkling service bays with the latest tools and diagnostic equipment.  I walked through a stunning parts room and we ended the tour getting Latte’s at the coffee bar and sitting in a well appointed customer service lounge. 

The car I was looking at was a bit of an exotic car, it had a reputation of being a little temperamental.  I realized the reason I was being sold on the cusotmer service, the reason they had taken great care to have absolutely stunning customer service was that I’d be spending a lot of time using it.

Should great customer service and support be the key selling point or differentiator?

This realization smacked me in the face over the past couple of weeks as a bought my new Iphone 4S.  For some reason, I didn’t go to Apple to buy it, I went to my phone company.  We had problems activating the phone (the system was overloaded), I later had to spend time and two phone calls doing little things with “customer service” to correct problems that I was having.  The service I got, was very good–I have no complaint with the agents I spoke to, but why was there a buying process that virtually mandated that I speak with them.

I reflected on previous experience.  Always before, I’ve walked into an Apple Store to buy the product.  Each time, they’ve set me up, I’ve walked out with a working product.  I bought some Apple Computers.  Normally, I reserve hours to set up a new computer, these took me just a few minutes.

Yes, I have used Apple customer service–both at the Genius bar, on the phone, and on line.  They are really great — for the 3 times in the past 5 years that I’ve had to do this.  But it seems they do something different, they design products, services, and buying experiences so that you don’t need customer service.

Customer service and support is critical.  Things do break, we need help doing things, we need someone who will own the problem and help us quickly solve it.

But something may be wrong if that’s what separates us from everyone else.  Perhaps a better strategy is to focus on never needing to test the customer service experience.

Related posts:

1. The Customer Service Call
2. Inspirational Moments In Customer Service
3. Great Product, Lousy Service, No Sale!

This week we’ll focus on a metric critical to major, global or key account managers.  For those of you with broad territories and dozens to hundreds of customers, this metric is probably of secondary importance.

The term ” wallet share” comes from the banking industry.  Typically it meant, how many of the bank’s product lines were you consuming.  For example, did you have checking, savings, credit cart, mortgage, loans, credit lines, and so forth.  Today, the term wallet share generally refers to the share of the customer’s purchases in your category you are obtaining.  For example if the customer is spending $1 million a year buying products for which you have solutions, and you are getting $400K of that spending, you would have 40% wallet share–with an opportunity to gain more of their spending.

Sometimes we use “share of customer” or account penetration as other terms for the same metric.

I’ve always been aggressive in looking at wallet share.  I’ve thought, “It’s my goal to achieve 100% wallet share!”  Realistically, that may be very difficult, but we want to grow our penetration and importance to the account.  In accounts where you are a component part supplier, there may be a policy two have second sources–the theory being, if one vendor can’t deliver the parts, another can.  It’s also used as a negotiating tactic for both vendors.  In these cases, you want to get yourself into the lead vendor position and seek to minimize the second sourcing. 

In capital equipment, software, or major services agreements, it may be possible to attain 100% wallet share, becoming major strategic vendors or partners to the customer.  For example, companies outsourcing all their IT operations to another company are giving that supplier 100% wallet share.  In these cases, there is a high degree of interdependency, trust, and very close relationships between the customer and vendor.

“Wallet Share” is a trailing goal, that is it’s an objective that you may set for the year, for example you want to increase wallet share by 15% over the next 12 months.  To achieve this goal, you have to put together specific activities (and measures) that enable you to reach this goal.

So once we’ve determined a goal for “wallet share,” how do we go about achieving our goal?  The key to this is developing and executing very strong account plans.  When you wash away all the fluff surrounding an account plan, the key objective of the account plan is to systematically identify all the areas in which you can compete–that is offer solutions—and then to develop strategies to win that business. 

The account plan is really a sort of focused prospecting plan.  Typically you look at an overall organization chart–map the divisions, business units or functions that have a need for the products and services you offer, map where you currently have business, identify areas where you can gain new business.  You then develop action plans, build relationships with the customers in the target business units, identify, prospect, and qualify new opportunities—just like you would in a general territory, but within a single account.  Once you’ve qualified an opportunity, you need to develop and execute your opportunity strategies.

Your account plan should include marketing programs–things that you will do to build visibility, awareness, and demand.  It should also include account nurturing programs.  While certain areas may not have a need to buy this year, they will some time–you want to be there when they have that need.

Your account plan should include very strong cross sell and upsell plans.  You should have plans to go into the current divisions you work with, finding ways to upsell or to sell a wider variety of products.

Many people confuse an account plan with opportunity plans—they have very different objectives.  The account plan’s goal is to identify new opportunities.  The opportunity plan’s goal is to win the deal.  Make sure you don’t confuse them.

Good account plans also look at nurturing the customer, maintaining strong and valued relationships, keeping high levels of satisfaction, and retaining and growing the business.  These are all good things to have and improve your ability to compete for new opportunities, but be clear—the account plan is a structured prospecting plan focused on finding new deals to compete for.

When you are developing your account plan, don’t forget, your competitor is developing their plan for the same account–they may also have a goal for 100% wallet share!

The account plan should be a living document.  It should have specific, measurable actions, and time frames.  You will want to track your progress against these actions and time frames.  You will want to adjust your account plan based on what you learn in executing the plan, as well as changes happening within the account itself.  These activities are the critical interim metrics that will help you stay on track to meet your wallet share goal.

Managers, coach your teams in developing their account plans.  Make sure they have profiled the account deeply, that they have plans to reach all parts of the account, not just the divisions they are currently in.  Make sure they align their plans with the customer’s strategies and priorities, creating greater value in the relationship.  Track them against the execution of the plans they have established.

Related posts:

1. Performance Management Friday — Activity Measures
2. Performance Management Friday — Funnel Balance
3. Performance Management Friday — Getting Personal

Customer experience is a hot topic.  There’s lots of activity with companies building better customer experiences, whether it’s focused on the “buyer’s journey,” the post sales customer experience, or the customer life cycle.  With our own company, I’ve seen how suppliers and potential vendors are restructuring things to create a “better customer experience,” or to “deepen our relationship.”

I get calls from our “relationship manager” from lots of companies.  They call to introduce themselves, they say they are responsible for our account, and ask how to better serve us.  At some point, they attempt to pitch a product.  I listen to all of this. 

The problem arises when I talk  to them about what I want to talk to them about.  Recently, I spoke to the relationship manager who handles our benefits and insurance programs (she’s the fourth relationship manager that’s been announced in the past year.  I said we needed to change some of the coverages in our account and asked for her help.  Her response was, “I can’t do that, you have to call another department.”  Confused, I asked, ” “I thought you were responsible for our relationship, why can’t you do this?”  Her response, “I can only sell you new things, I can’t help with items on your current accounts.  You’ll have to call such and such a department to do what you want.”  I sigh, “Well can you connect me with that department?”  I was transferred to the main switchboard, had to go through the voice prompts—-press 1 if you, press 2 if you—then sat on hold for 7 minutes.

I got a call from one of the credit card companies we use in our merchant accounts.  They wanted me to promote the use of their credit card on our sites.  “Why should I do that, why do I care?” I asked.  The response was, “We’d like much more of your business.”  I respond, “We offer your credit card as a convenience to our customers, but we want them to use whatever card they prefer, I don’t see a reason why we should do this.  By the way, I have a question about our last month’s statement….”  Our relationship manager expressed his disappointment, thanked me for my time, and transferred me to another department to respond to my query.

The stories go on.  I don’t try to be difficult, but when someone tells me they are responsible for managing our relationship, I think they are responsible for managing our relationship.  I think they are my go to person for anything I need to accomplish with that company–whether it’s buying new services, getting information, solving a problem.

When I read of these companies doing things to improve the customer experience, I wonder who are they designing it for-me, the customer, or for themselves?  Is the customer experience to improve the ability of the customer to connect with the company or to improve the internal efficiency of the company in dealing with the customer?

I thought customer experience was about the customer’s experience…… maybe I ‘m wrong.

Related posts:

1. Rethinking The Customer Buying Experience
2. The Customer Service Call
3. Moving From Customer Acquisiton To Customer Engagement

There’s a huge amount of discussion about questions in selling.  Entire books have been written about questions and questioning, questions are the focus of all sorts of training programs and fodder for thousands of blog posts (a few of which I’ve written myself).

But questions aren’t the fundamental issue–conversations are.  Questions are an important part of establishing a conversation, but I think focusing on questions creates an imbalance and may, in fact, detract from our ability to have conversations.

What’s critical in sales is establishing meaningful, high impact conversations with customers.  Those conversations are an exchange of information, ideas, opinions, and points of view.  It’s through conversations that we connect and engage our customers, (and others).

Think about it, when we get together with friends and colleagues we think about the conversation.  We don’t think about our questioning strategy for this weekend’s barbeque  (Though many years ago I did obsess about my pick up lines–but that’s a different discussion).  If we are having a team meetings, we don’t think about the mix of the open and close ended questions we ask–we think about the purpose of the meeting, the discussion we need to have, and how we achieve the goal of the meeting.

So why do we treat the customer call differently.  Why aren’t we focused on the quality of the conversation?  Why don’t we look at how we engage the customer in talking about something meaningful in achieving their goals?  Why don’t we start thinking about the conversation instead of just the questions.

Conversations are filled with all sorts of things–they’re the tools we need to leverage in engaging and connecting with our customers.  Questions are an important part of conversations—listening is more important.  In thinking about a meeting, what’s our listening strategy?  Probing, expressing an opinion, understanding and expressing points of view, pushing back, perhaps disagreeing at times—all are important elements of a conversation.  Conversation involve feelings, emotions, values.

We need to  think about all dimensions of a conversation.  We need to prepare ourselves to have a conversation and engage the customers.  We need to prepare ourselves to be part of the conversation, not just the back and forth of question-answer, question-answer.

Things to think about:

• Do we know how to listen and hear? Do we know about active listening and do we practice active listening?
• D o we have a point of view that is meaningful to the customer?  Do we have the courage to express it and push back–politely challenging the customer?
• Are we prepared to hear the customer’s point of view and perhaps change our position?
• Do we care about the conversation, or are we just looking to execute the next step to pitching our product and asking for the order.  We have to be interested in our customers–the organizations and the individuals.  They are not a transaction.
• Are we capable of engaging in a conversation when it goes “off script?”  Do we even need a scipt, but can we be more thoughtful about our engagement?
• Are we prepared to invest ourselves, as people, into the conversation?  We are asking the customer to invest themselves–to talk about their dreams, problems, and challenges.  We have to prepare to invest and reveal something about ourselves if we hope to engage the customer–what do we stand for, what do we value, why should the customer trust us?

It’s hard to get training in “conversations,” though you should look at Susan Scott’s work in  the book, Fierce Conversations.   But we can learn how to have powerful conversations.  We can study why the conversations on this weekend’s barbeque works–we can adopt some of the principles underlying those conversations.  We can look at why conversations amongst our peers and colleagues work, we can try the same with our customers.

For your next call, are you preparing your questions or are you preparing for a conversation?

Related posts:

1. Less Talk And A Little More Conversation
2. Value Creation Starts With Great Questions
3. Akamai Has It Right! Engage Customers In A Different Conversation

I was talking to a customer today–not one of mine–possibly one of yours.  We were talking about her frustrations, as a buyer, with sales people.  She said something that struck me, “What happened to common sense?”

It’s always fun and refreshing to talk to buyers, someone who is subjected to all the stuff sales people inflict on them.  As a side note, I recommend every sales person take one of their customer out to lunch in the next four weeks and talk to them about their experiences with sales people, and how they would like to be treated.  In general, I’ve found buyers very open to these conversations–after all if we listen to them, and act, we will be establishing the relationships they wanted in the first place.

My conversation this morning was really refreshing.  This customer was a sophisticate buyer of technology solutions and services.  She understood the jobs of sales people and appreciated the difficulty of the sales job.   Her statements echoed those of other customers I talk to:

• “I just want them to listen to me!  Sometimes they are so focused on their agenda, they don’t really listen or they listen selectively.  I want to help them propose something that solves my problems, but they have to hear me first.”
• “Just talk to me!  Don’t do all that sales mumbo jumbo.  We’re both human beings, can’t we have a conversation?”
• “Stop trying to manipulate me!  I know the 12 closing techniques, and I have at least 12 ways to shut you down.  I’ve seen all the techniques, the tricks, I don’t appreciate them.  Why can’t we just talk about what you can do to help me?
• “Solve my problem, not the one you want to solve!  I only care about the things that help me do what I want to do, so don’t waste my time with stuff that’s irrelevant to me.”
• “Be prepared, be knowledgeable.  You should know that I’ve done my homework before you even walk into my office.  I’ve done a fair amount of research–I may not understand everything, but don’t treat me like an idiot.  Above all, don’t give me a tutorial about how to do my job or function, I know what my job is.”
• “Be responsive.  There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to reach a sales person to get information, to discuss the next steps and not to be able to get in touch with them.  It seems things are almost backwards, the more I play ‘Hard to get,” the more responsive and proactive sales people seem to be.  Once I engage them and start talking to them, they’re suddenly too busy to talk to me and follow up–it’s kind of weird.”
• “Understand when no means no.  We may disagree, I may say no.  I respect a certain amount of push back to understand my reasons, but when I say no and have explained myself, don’t be a pest.  We’ll have future opportunities, but don’t piss me off by continuing to come after me.
• “Realize that I’m human.  I value relationship, I value the relationships I have with my suppliers.  Don’t make me a transaction–at least if you want a long term relationship.”

We wound up our conversation, she sighed, “It all seems so simple.  It’s just common sense, common politeness, and having valuable conversations.”

Out of the mouths of customers…….

Try it out, take a favorite customer out to lunch, the only agenda should be about selling—not about what you want to sell them, not even about what they want to buy.  Save that for a later conversation.

Ask them how you should engage them as a buyer, ask them how they want to be sold, ask them to tell you about some of the best sales people they have worked with.  Take notes, figure it out, then act on it.  I think you will be surprised.

Related posts:

1. What Do Formula 1 Drivers and Great Sales Professionals Have In Common?
2. Developing And Maintaining A Sense Of Urgency
3. What Happened To The Conversation?

Perhaps I’m a little grumpy, anxious to get an early start to the weekend, but I had to get this off my chest.

I just hung up from a “customer service call.”  It was from a Fortune 100 company.  Here’s how it went:

Customer Service Rep (CSR):  “Hi, I’m so and so from such and such company.  I’m calling to follow up on a warranty repair we did.”

Dave (puzzled):  “I’m a little confused, we haven’t had a warranty repair recently, how can I help you?”

CSR:  “We replaced this part on this device, we just wanted to make sure everything is working well and you are satisfied with the repair.”

Dave (more puzzled):  “Well that was more than 2 years ago.”

CSR:  “Yes, I know, were you happy with the service, is everything working to your satisfaction?”

Dave:  “Can you tell me why you are calling now, and what you are trying to achieve?”

CSR:  “We just want to make sure you are satisfied.”

Dave:  “But that was more than 2 years ago, why are you calling now?”

CSR:  “We also noticed your warranty service expired 18 months ago, if that problem happened again, it would be very expensive to repair, can we extend your warranty? Aren’t you concerned”

Dave:  “No, if I had been, I would have renewed my warranty 18 months ago, so why are you calling now?”

CSR:  “Ugh…………..  I’m not sure……..  Do you want to renew your warranty?”

Dave:  “I already told you I don’t care.  I also no longer own the product, I donated it to a community group over a year ago.”

CSR:  “Ugh……….  Do they want a warranty?”

Dave:  “Why don’t you call them, good bye.”

I really can’t hold the CSR too much at fault.  He was just following a script for a program that some marketing, product management, or other person had developed.  It was poorly conceived, terribly designed and badly executed.  And my guess is this call was inflicted on 10′s of thousands of customers.

There were so many lost opportunities in this call.

First, the message I got—between the lines—was this company really doesn’t care at all about it’s customers.  If it did care about the customers and their satisfaction, a follow up call a few days or a week after the repair would have been appropriate.  (No, I don’t remember getting a call then—but it was over 2 years ago).

As a customer, I felt there was a lot of arrogance what they were trying to achieve.  They really weren’t  interested in my satisfaction, but they used that to disguise their true intent–to sell me something, either the latest greatest model or a warranty contract.

It’s even worse, I when I disposed of the old product, I had bought the latest greatest new replacement from this very company, indicating it was a replacement for the product I purchased.  Why didn’t they know that, why hadn’t they “connected the dots,” perhaps refining their call strategy, maybe talking to me about the product I had purchased and whether I wanted to buy warranty service for that (about to expire in a couple of months).

They missed all sorts of opportunities to have a higher impact on me, to nurture and build a relationship, to build my loyalty as a customer.  They didn’t recognize the long relationship I had been developing with them through repeat purchases over many years.  To them, I wasn’t a long term, repeat customer, I was a person who had a customer service call more than 2 years ago.  The relationship I thought I had been building was nothing more than transactions.

We have all sorts of wonderful technologies to build and nurture relationships, to understand customer history, to analyze this history, to look at all the interactions a customer may have had.  These tools can help us shape our conversations, to be more meaningful, to be relevant, to have a higher impact, to build the relationship, and to demonstrate to each customer that they are valued.  There are elegant CRM systems, marketing tools, analytic tools, lots of things that we use to more effectively engage our customers with appropriate, relevant, timely communications.

I might be a little more forgiving of this company if I didn’t know that they had all these tools—they are the “poster child” of many of the leading Sales 2.0/Enterprise X.0 companies.  Their executives attend the same conferences I attend and speak of how they are using the tools to build more timely and relevant communications, to nurture relationships with their customers.

Funny, I didn’t experience any of this timely and relevant communication.  I don’t know what went wrong.  My relationship had been reduced to a transaction, a single poorly executed call with false premises, focused solely on getting an order.

I’m grumpy and disappointed—we, as sales and marketing professionals, can be so much better than this.  We have so much more capability to better engage our prospects and customers.  We have so much capability to build and nurture relationships.  We have so much capability to demonstrate and create value.

There are great tools to facilitate this–but the tools aren’t the most critical thing.  We need to think about how we (or whether we) value customers.  We need to think about the customer experiences we are designing.  We need to provide the leadership, develop and execute these strategies.   We need to put in place the right processes, hire the right people, train and coach them.  We need to have the right tools, we need to leverage the data we have.

As sales and marketing professionals we have to be thoughtful, about what we do.  It’s just a easy to develop a strong program to build the relationship with customers as it is to build a program that’s nothing more than a sham.  I’d also bet, the first produces better short and long term results than the latter.

Related posts:

1. Inspirational Moments In Customer Service
2. On Being Customer Centric
3. The Sales Call