Expanding and Retaining Sales is NOT Just a Sales Problem

Today competition is hot. Every product or service has or will have competition. You may be first--look at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Popeye's took KFC on by exploiting a market trend to spicier food and being available--just down the street.

The market changes fast. Do you review:

Do you really know why your customers buy and what really frustrates or annoys them? 

Problems are opportunities for new products and services. Do you have annual reviews with key customers on why they really use your products or services?

One client started weekly meetings with customer service reps to gather patterns of customer complaints. These meetings provided three benefits:

1. Preventative maintenance. Problems got fixed before they multiplied into losses. 
2. New product and service ideas: what frustrated or restrained customers?
3. Heightened awareness and pride in the vital function service plays. A side benefit was stress relief for service reps--it's a lonely and punishing job!

Providing customers opportunities to really be honest, listening to understand, and not getting defensive are keys to market retention, expansion and customer loyalty.

Sales performance: keeping your sales edge.

The knee jerk reaction to low sales is better train the sales people. Keeping your sales team sharp, positive and focused is a challenge. 

Is training and development a portion of every sales meeting? You have sales people who do things well; let them share success stories. Role play typical customer situations such as overcoming objections, engaging to involve, testing and closing techniques. Encourage sales people to constructively express frustrations and find solutions. 

Keep it positive, not preachy. Genuinely find new ways around barriers.

One of our clients had been "training a customer service unit to sell" for two years and had not made any significant impact to sales. Our approach was to provide a more comprehensive solution that resulted in significant sales results within sixty days.  If you’ve experienced flat sales after training, selling skills aren't your only problem. 

In some cases organizations unwittingly create barriers that undermine the best sales efforts.

One of the most important marketing and selling concepts is how to create client trust. Customer belief develops from what we do, not what we say. However, how many sales people behave as if what we say results in customer belief? Understanding the level of trust a client has in your product or service is key to producing customer loyalty. There are three levels of trust before you achieve buyer loyalty.

Low levels of trust begin to develop depending on how you comport yourself, your professionalism, knowledge and most of all quality of questions and listening. The ability to engage with insightful questions will increase the value the customer perceives. The customer will continue to talk as long as they see value.

How you make the customer feel? Do you listen to understand them as individuals? Does their business seem important to you? Do you exude openness and sincerity? Do you exhibit supportive behaviors that turn features into customer benefits? For example, do you say, "our product is reliable" or do you say, "you'll keep your business running; our product has reduced client service calls by 75%." Which statement grabs you?

Consistency and what you (and your organization) actually do are what build the ultimate level of trust: belief you will improve their situation. Do you keep your promises? This is where organizations often unwittingly undermine sales by not keeping promises. For example, if you promise quick delivery and then the delivery doesn’t happened as planned, what happens to client belief? If you’re selling a service or a very complex project, have you shown the customer in the initial proposal that you understand their situation, objectives and what needs to be delivered? Does every sentence and graphic in your proposal cause the customer to nod yes? Is your summary readable? Does it grab customers' attention?

Ultimately, most organization depend on multiple individuals for sales, service and delivery. The level of customer loyalty is the Depth of the Business Relationship. However, the utility or ease of doing business with an organization either enhances or detracts from sales efforts. 

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Providing a selling assessment for a sales force of 30 presented an interesting company-wide sales profile. The sales people were uniformly frustrated and more than 50% were viewed by customers as rude, insensitive and  and not very interested in the customer. These perceptions are a problem if you're trying to build customer relationships to beat the competition. Strong scores in closing, overcoming objections and qualifying the customer further exacerbated the situation. These strong sales skills for results were working against building relationships because relationship skills weren't being used.

In our initial meeting with the sales people, we learned very quickly the source of the sales frustration: an ineffective inventory system was literally causing sales people to pilfer products loaded for the branch offices before the trucks left the loading docks. Margins were low because sales people were buying from the competition to fill orders!  Moreover, an ineffective incentive program caused sales to focus on delivery tickets to make a better commission. Company policies required remedy before sales could improve. By listening to the sales people, we enlisted help with the solution.

The best business relationship can be undermined by poor delivery and service performance. Remember, it’s what your organization does and how you make the client feel.

Many factors enter into ease or utility. Ease is also affected by whether you are a product or service organization. How do you compare to others in your industry? What frustrates or restrains the customer from getting what s/he really wants? How could your organization provide faster, cheaper or more value to the customer?

Do gaps exist you could exploit? The classic example of exploiting gaps is Contadina Pasta. Fresh pasta was unavailable to the consumer. Contadina filled this gap with an entirely new product line—fresh pasta. Do industry practices offer opportunities for new business? 

How does customer trust level impact expanding and retaining customer base?

Trust level is a key element in expanding and protecting existing sales. Trust develops from seeing value, but customers "buy" emotionally based on how they "feel" about you. If a prior relationship exists, buying decisions will be based on what you and your organization actually do. Relationships are hard to build and easy to lose. The best relationship cannot overcome an organization that makes it hard to do business. Staying in tune with the competition is essential to keeping your organization easy to do business. The next graphic depicts the relationship of trust and the ease of doing business with you in expanding and retaining customers.

A strong interrelationship exists between strategy, sales, delivery and service. If you make it hard to do business with you, customers buy from habit, not loyalty.

The best sales force can’t overcome buyers not seeing value in your product or service. They also can only appease poor service or sloppy delivery until the competition moves in. Is it time to re-direct energy in your organization?

How well does your organization bridge the client belief gap?

To receive a free questionnaire that measures your sales effectiveness against your ease of doing business, email janicescanlan@earthlink.net. In your subject area request Trust/Ease. Please indicate whether you are in product or service sales.

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