• Deliver – Do what you say you are going to do, when you say you are going to do it.

My flooring supplier missed five delivery slots in the space of two weeks; one of the missed slots was promised as a personal delivery by the company owner.

• Get it right! – Make sure you have all the information you need to fulfil the customer’s request.

One of the excuses used by my flooring supplier, after the fifth missed delivery, was that they had the wrong delivery address even though I had confirmed it with them on, at least, four separate occasions

• Take Ownership – Inevitably things sometimes go wrong, take responsibility and personal accountability for putting things right. Do everything you need to do to turn customer dissatisfaction into delight.

If the company I’m referring to had bothered to do anything that they said they were going to do to put things right – I would have simply thought that it was one of those things and been satisfied, they haven’t!

• Communicate – Tell the customer what is happening throughout the process. The value of regular on going contact cannot be underestimated.

The flooring supplier that I used just stopped answering my calls (over 250 of them) deliberately dropping them only replying via email or text message with more broken promises! It got so bad that I was on the verge of contacting a solicitor to investigate how I go about starting legal proceedings to recover my money. Eventually, by text, I was told that the reason the supplier stopped answering my calls was that he was “profoundly embarrassed”. If he had just taken the time to talk to me the situation could have been resolved much sooner.

• Follow up – Find out if the customer is satisfied with the product or service they have received. Ask them what you could do better and what they liked/appreciated about your company. This data is vital in improving the product or service that you offer, differentiating you from your competitors.

Needless to say in my recent experience this has not happened in any way shape or form, except that the partial refund promise has, you’ve guessed it, been broken.

On a final note, think about how many people I’m talking to about my recent terrible experience. Trust me, I’m not just blogging about it, I’m telling anyone who will listen.  Research tells us that the people that I tell will tell between 7 and 10 others about my experience to ensure that they avoid using the same supplier. That’s a lot of feedback and potentially a lot of lost sales.  From a purely commercial perspective how can you afford not to offer customers goodservice?

Image by krossbow via Flickr

In these challenging economic times, the importance of having commercially aware staff has been brought into sharp focus.  When I worked for Virgin Active (many years ago), the CEO would hold a monthly meeting in which he’d share with all his staff the latest facts and figures; milestones passed and targets yet to be achieved.  As someone with a background in sales I always appreciated this, but many of my colleagues would grumble about attending, believing that because they worked in customer service, or marketing they didn’t need to understand how well the company was performing, or what the current EBITDA was.

Unfortunately, this attitude can be found in many organisations, particularly larger ones, and can be hugely damaging.  Sales people lacking in commercial awareness may end up passing on goods or services at a loss to the company, whilst still managing to achieve their own targets.  Customer service reps may habitually give away more value than the company can really afford.  Developers may spend valuable time on a project that their employer will struggle to bring to market, yet all these staff may still wrongly believe they are doing what’s best for their employer; worse still, they maybe unwittingly creating unnecessary work for colleagues in other departments – especially in organisations where ‘siloing’ is the norm.  All this leads to inefficiency, and ultimately affects the bottom line.

Commercial awareness goes beyond just understanding the financial position.  It means ensuring that all staff understand their leadership’s vision and are working together to achieve the same goals.  It means each department engaging the others when making decisions.  It means working smart, for everyone’s benefit.  It means seeing the bigger picture.

Phoenix run a challenging, business specific and highly practical commercial awareness programme.  We can also help leaders and managers communicate their vision more effectively, and think more strategically.  For more information, please get in touch.

Sales managers spend a lot of time reminding their sales teams how far off the target they are, they tell them that they need to sell more!  Do they imagine that the salesperson is not one hundred per cent aware of the situation. Almost every sales person knows how far they are from their target. They are desperate to hit their targets, not only for the financial gain in terms of bonus and compensation but also for the recognition they receive both from colleagues and friends and even family.  Hitting targets is what it is all about, a sales person status depends on it.  A sales person’s motivation is more often than not success, it is not as simple as money, money is a bi-product, success leads inevitably to success because the sales person’s mind expects success.  During a recession a sales person’s mind tends to expect failure.

Approach and attitude are vital for a sales person’s success at the moment.  Sales people are often expected to be “self motivated” and when things are going well this is less of a problem.  Many of the conditions needed to maintain motivation are in place; success for one, recognition, praise, progress, engagement with clients are all of the aspects of the job that make it fun, interesting and challenging.  Challenging but not impossible.  During a recession sales are fewer and farther apart, targets are going up, the distance between success and where I am at the moment is growing.  The sales person thinks “I will never make this month’s target”.  So many of those positive conditions are replaced with negatives.

This is where the managers have to help the sales teams.  Helping them to focus on obtainable targets.  Targets such as “contact ten customers you haven’t spoken to ever/in the last two months etc”.  I have been telling sales managers to change the focus; “tell your team not to sell anything this morning”, this seemingly strange piece of advice has a purpose.  By getting your team not to sell but to find out something new about their clients, it will focus them on questioning and investigative techniques that will inevitably lead to a sale.  The point is that the focus is on strong technique and it changes the attitude and approach of the sales person.  If the sales manager puts pressure on the sales person to sell, it will change the focus to the closing aspect of the process.  In the modern environment, clients are too sophisticated to be swayed by hard selling.

Strong consultative selling will develop relationships and result in positive results.  Sales people will be encouraged by the results they see, the progress they make and this will maintain a positive, proactive approach which is precisely what is needed at the moment for many sales people.  Tightening up on structure and maintaining a positive approach will ultimately hit targets, panic and pressure will not.  This is difficult for sales managers – I know they themselves are under huge pressure to achieve results – but I think it is essential that they maintain focus on how they will achieve those results.  The argument between quality and quantity rages during times like this but putting pressure on making more calls will lead to a drop in quality.  Sales managers must maintain the balance between the two.  They must work hard to maintain the attitude and approach of the sales team, this is the vital factor whilst selling in a recession.

[Image from Wikipedia on licences: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License ]

During an economic downturn, a sales person is confronted by challenges.  They receive many knocks.  They are told “no” more than they would like and certainly more than a year or so ago.  For approximately a year, sales people have worked hard just to get a sale.  Now that, dare I say it, we are starting to see a few green shoots of recovery, the sales person must be thinking about maximising opportunities.  Six months ago the prospect of cross selling or upselling might in some areas have been a little fanciful, over ambitious or simply not appropriate.  All efforts were put into just achieving a sale, clearly budgets were and are tight, the sales person has to work extremely hard to make a sale.

Upselling is always talked about in sales meetings, sales managers are clearly keen for their teams to take every opportunity to upsell, however the pressure they put on their sales teams often ends up with poor execution of the task.  Sales people enter a sales situation, the client may well be showing interest in “product a”, the sales person identifies a need for the product, the client agrees and so the sales person presents the product matching the need.  So far so good.  The client agrees to buy “product a”. The sales person suddenly remembers the sales manager’s voice “upsell wherever you can”.  So they blurt out “would you also be interested in Product b?”

The result is that the client thinks to themselves “I have just committed to buying product a, which matches my needs and is therefore of use to me and so I will spend some money on it.  Product b, seems to be an add on which I had not thought about and certainly not budgeted for, so NO THANKS”.  It is the same scenario when cross-selling.  By introducing something else after having sold the first product or element to the service pretty much always gets the same result unless the sales person is lucky!  I am always reminded of the shoe shop example.  We buy a lovely new pair of shoes and are then asked when we get to the cash desk, would you like to buy some “waterproofing cream” for your shoes or some such product.  At that moment, we do not think for one minute that we will need it.  We have never needed it in the past (or have forgotten that we did need it once) so we see this as an annoying effort by the shoe shop to take more of our money.

So what is missing?  If you want to upsell or cross sell, your whole sales strategy must reflect this and do not simply add on options.  Use questions to develop more than one need.  When selling training solutions, I will try to develop two conversations, right from the start.  If the enquiry is about sales training, for example, I will ask questions about their managers, (and vice versa) this will start to create a need for both.  If it does not the opportunity for cross selling is reduced.  The point is that when trying to upsell and cross sell the client/customer must have a need for everything you are selling.  After selling the “lead” product, add ons, extras, options are not attractive to a buyer. Their needs have been matched and they have committed to the first product. They do not think they need anything else.  More questions will create more needs.

In conclusion, to upsell, a sales person must develop existing levels of purchase.  To do this a need to buy more must be created, rather than more being offered!  To Cross sell, a sales person must create a need for a customer to buy another product from their range.  Instead of assuming that they will want to do this, a new level of need has to be created.  Remember, I have one need for shoes, I have another need for polish!