CELEBRATE YOUR CUSTOMERS
Do you ever give your customers a standing ovation? I mean a real flag waving hoopla?
Do you make a fuss over them? Do you go over the top in demonstrating that you see them as the royalty of your business?
Or do you think it’s good enough just to have your invoices printed with ‘Thank You’ at the bottom? Maybe you send a ‘Merry Christmas’ email dutifully every year because the business-as usual playbook says so.
If you have fallen into this trap reverse your engines.
- Mediocre salespeople think it’s all about them. And that perfunctory thank you is not enough.
- Great salespeople know that it is critical to start with the customer, take a step back to determine what will delight them to make the sale, and then fast forward again to shower the customer with love.
At this point, you may be confusing the idea of celebrating your customers with fawning over them. But I have something else in mind.
Something like actually paying attention to them: caring, thinking, dreaming and wondering enough about what they say and what they are asking, to challenge them. To developing a solution to their needs based on what your analysis tells you is even more valuable to them, instead of just giving them not what they ask for; even if it flies in the face of what they started off thinking they wanted.
You don’t serve your customers by dutifully taking orders. That’s old school salesmanship and a sure fire way to do the opposite of celebrating your customers. Yes, you may make them happy for the moment but–and this is important–it’s at the expense of truly identifying what’s in their best interests. You’re robbed of the opportunity to influence a change from what they think they want to what it is you discover they really need.
As a CEO and an adviser, I find that my and my firm’s best and most productive business relationships are born when a client enters the room thinking they know what they want, and using experience, insight and intuition, we prompt them to change their mind.
The goal is never to be contrarian for its own sake, but to celebrate your client in such a substantive way that you care enough to:
- Invest in the development of a wiser solution than what the knee jerk response would be.
- Take the risk of displeasing the client at the outset because you don’t agree with them.
- Engage in something far more powerful than a vendor relationship by transitioning to a collaborator. The fact is, the process of collaboration not only leads to an unusually close affiliation but opens doors of opportunity that are richer and more sustainable than those driven expressly by the desire to make a sale.
Celebrate the customer in the true sense of the word and the economics will take care of itself.
Mark Stevens is the CEO of MSCO, a results-driven management and marketing firm, and the bestselling author of Your Marketing Sucks and God Is a Salesman. He is also a popular media commentator on a host of business matters including marketing, branding, management and sales. He is also the author of the popular marketing blog, Unconventional Thinking.
CUSTOMER SERVICE SELLS (No, Really, It Does)
Who doesn’t love the pure innate pleasure of buying? Whether it’s a magazine in the airport or the art that hangs on your wall, what you buy is an extension of who you are. Your purchases embody your needs, your desires and your unique way of being. They speak to who you are as a person and how you choose to live your life. Every purchase is an unspoken expression of what you value. So, if you’re looking for a simple way to increase long-term sales, deliver an outcome that is in direct alignment with your what your customer values.
For me, it’s important to have a clean, comfortable and neat home. It’s what I value. I recently expressed this value by hiring two cleaning companies–and I received two very different outcomes. As a result, I learned something very important about how companies go about showing you that their products or services meet your needs and values.
I always thought cleaning was just cleaning. You know, simple and straight forward–windows, floors and linens. Bring me home to a fresh, sparkling throne with the toilet paper folded over like those swanky hotels, and I’m a happy man. Both companies satisfied these cleaning needs, but there was one distinct difference. The first cleaning company replaced items like picture frames, candles and art in places different than originally positioned. Not on the other side of the house, but six inches over to the left or at a different angle (which made me freakin’ nuts). The second cleaning company put the items back in their original positions.
My assumption was that, even though the good folks from the first cleaning company could clean effectively, they were inattentive, or worse yet, incompetent because they couldn’t put anything back where they found it. It turns out, however, that they were actually attempting to demonstrate a job well done–that they had actually cleaned. They were of the mind that if items were moved then I would know that they had been there and done the work. It never occurred to me they were moving things to demonstrate their work. I was shocked. I really just thought they were incompetent.
It turns out that both cleaning companies attempted to serve me in their own way. The interesting part is how they chose to demonstrate their work. The first approach was about the company providing the service. The second approach was about service for customer satisfaction. I favor the second approach–big shocker–and it’s not just because I’m obsessive-compulsive about my stuff. No, really, it isn’t.
It reminds me of Tony Alessandra’s Platinum Rule, the alternative to the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule tells us to treat others the way they want to be treated. The Platinum Rule tells us to treat others the way they want to be treated. Big difference.
If you look at the way a lot of people are selling and serving, you’ll see that they’re taking the show-as-you-go approach. They’re looking for a way to show off something that they think is relevant. Instead, let your customers decide what the work should look like. Go a little above and beyond and fold the hand towels like a flower. That might be a little much, but maybe not. This is all obvious stuff, right? Sure, but if it were that easy, you’d close every sales call and never get a customer complaint for as long as you lived.
When your customers set expectations from the start, you create a successful environment to serve them. In my case, the cleaners now appreciate that the candle wax gets cleaned, but the candle needs to go back where I put it. Once I expressed this to them, they even decided to take photos so they can serve me better and put things back in the same place.
The moment you create buying opportunities with benefits and eliminate distractions, you optimize the pleasure of buying, and who in the heck wouldn’t want to minimize this very simple, but powerful pleasure of life? Give your customers a little “buying therapy.” Allow them to enjoy every minute of expressing their values with an outcome perfectly suited to them. We can all serve our customers this way–and in the meantime increase sales opportunities to sell them over and over again.
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