Everyone says they’re customer-focused. The stark reality is that most of us aren’t.
photo by uismolinero/dpc
Sales coach Gavin Ingham recently expressed a frustration common to those of us in the sales training business — our clients want advice on how to close sales, but don’t seem interested in earning the right to make the sale in the first place:
As a sales speaker, I often get asked by sales directors what they should do to make more sales. How do we convince the client? How do we demonstrate value over price? How do we negotiate a better deal? How do we shorten buying cycles? Etc etc. All of these have one thing in common and that is that they are all about you. They are not all about the client.
I rarely (for rarely read never) get asked for help that is client focused. People do not call me and ask how they can better understand their clients, they call me and ask how they can close more sales. People do not call me to understand why their clients went elsewhere, they call me to ask how they can convince their clients to buy from them. People do not call me to ask me help them understand why they did not engage their clients, they call me to ask how they can persuade and influence more effectively.
This may sound like semantics but it is a BIG deal.”
It is a big deal. Salespeople already know what they want to sell, and why they want to sell it. What many of them never bother to find out is what their customer wants to buy, and why they would want to buy it.
Two Easy Customer-Focus Tests For Salespeople
1. Look at the last couple times a customer turned you down and went to the competition. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they did it? (Advice on what to do about that is here.)
2. Think about the last couple of times a customer cancelled an order in mid-campaign. Do you know why — from their perspective, not yours — they cancelled?
I often hear from salespeople who just took a big cancellation and want advice on how to change the client’s mind. Unfortunately, it’s too late by then.
The best time to reverse a cancellation is before the cancellation happens.Click To Tweet This
Cancellation prevention requires knowing what the customer’s goals are for the campaign. Knowing about challenges to implementing the campaign, and working with the client to address those challenges. Constantly checking in to make sure that results are meeting expectation.
In short, cancellation prevention requires true focus on the customer
If you don’t know why the client cancelled, or went with the competitor, you may not be as customer-focused as you think you are.
What did you miss, and how can you do better next time?
Here’s how: learn something valuable that your colleagues and competitors don’t know.
photo by waldemarus/dpc
Here’s one example:
Every state has consumer protection laws designed to shield the public from deceptive advertisers. Many small business owners don’t know the laws, and can’t afford to pay a lawyer to keep them on the right side of the law. During my radio advertising sales days, I became that expert.
One day, I saved a client several thousand dollars with that kind of knowledge. He was the General Manager of a local auto dealership. He had worked for a long time in the Portland car business, moved to California for several years, and recently returned to Oregon.
He emailed me because he was planning to launch a new used-car promotion. He had a selection of pre-owned vehicles priced at half their original MSRP, and wanted to feature them in his radio advertising.
What he didn’t know is that while he’d been in California, the state of Oregon had made it illegal to compare a used vehicle’s price to the MSRP in an ad. The official commentary accompanying that section of the law (technically an Administrative Rule) explained that MSRP is a term reserved strictly for new vehicles. Because so many factors (mileage, wear and tear, accidents, etc) affect the price of a used car, the revised law prohibited using an MSRP in any way when referring to anything pre-owned.
I knew this because a little more than a year before, I’d been the only Portland broadcast rep to drive to Salem for a seminar on the new laws. So I was able to warn my client away from a strategy that would have earned him a substantial fine from the state.
My automotive clients knew I’d taken the time to learn the rules, that I had copies of all the relevant consumer protection laws, and that I checked with my contacts at the Oregon Department of Justice if I wasn’t sure of something.
They also knew that my competitors hadn’t gone to the seminar (I’d been known to bring that up in conversation), and didn’t know the law as well as I did. So I got phone calls, and business, from advertisers who might otherwise take their money to another station.
These days, I train advertising salespeople to do their jobs more effectively, and automotive remains a huge advertising category. In every state I travel to, there’s a crying need for someone who knows the consumer protection laws and can advise their clients on how to keep their marketing legal. It’s rare that I ever see anyone try to fill that need.
Can you be that expert at your radio or television station?
[reminder]What do you know that your competitors don’t? Where can you be the “go-to” expert?[/reminder]
“If you put together a program that drives traffic to your client’s website, and that traffic never turns into money, you have failed. Don’t just shrug your shoulders and blame the advertiser. You are an Account Executive. Your job is to execute. If the campaign fails and the client cancels, it’s on you.”
Rod’s reply:
Is it also on the AE if his radio or TV ads bring traffic to the store, but the traffic never turns into money because: a) the store doesn’t have the merchandise; b) store employees aren’t doing their job; c) anything else that isn’t directly under the AE’s control causes the prospect to take his money elsewhere?
Of course not.
The AE’s job is to execute the actions for which he is directly responsible. Holding him accountable for the client’s failure (to convert traffic into sales, or whatever), when he hasn’t been given the authority or resources to effect the necessary changes, seems a bit much. Of course a conscientious AE is going to call attention to problems he spots and suggest solutions, but in the end, it’s on the advertiser.
I believe that the salesperson needs to be actively looking for ways that things can go wrong, and taking pro-active steps to make sure those issues are dealt with before the campaign hits the air.
Here’s a story of a time that I failed to do that.
In 2006 I was a salesperson for Clear Channel Radio (now iHeart Media) in Portland, Oregon. I stumbled onto a great summer auto dealer promotion idea in a newsletter, and took it to one of my biggest clients, Beaverton Mitsubishi.
The idea: on a designated weekend, everyone who takes a test drive gets a free half-gallon of ice cream.
The logic: many buyers — especially used car buyers — spend an afternoon on Auto Row, going from dealership to dealership test driving the cars. It’s frustrating to spend significant time with a customer only to have that customer wave and head for the lot across the street. Give them a carton of ice cream, and they have to go home and put it in the freezer. Your lot is the last one they visit for the day.
The store GM loved it and we scheduled the promotion for a weekend in July. I told the general manager to tell the salespeople to give everyone the ice cream after a test drive, whether they asked for it or not.
This wasn’t really a traffic-driving promotion — even though we ran radio ads, I wasn’t convinced a lot of people would make a special trip to Beaverton Mitsubishi just to get some ice cream. The aim was to change the behavior of every customer who took a test drive, not just those who responded to the radio.
The GM promised he’d let his sales managers know, and they’d tell the salespeople. That sounded fine to me.
Big mistake.
I found a company to rent us a freezer and had it delivered to the dealership. The GM was supposed to buy the ice cream, but a couple of days before the event he asked me to do it because he “didn’t have time.”
Warning sign. I missed it.
I picked up 25 half gallons of ice cream, brought them to the store and stocked the freezer. I showed them to the GM and told him to call my cell phone if he ran low and I’d pick up some more.
The weekend came and went. No calls from the store. On Monday I went back to the store, and there were 20 half-gallons of ice cream still in the freezer. The manager told me that the promotion had bombed.
It turned out that the managers hadn’t really explained the concept to the salespeople. Some of them had no idea why there was a freezer in the back office, and the ones who knew about the promotion thought they were only supposed to give the ice cream to people who mentioned the ad.
Whose responsibility was that? It was mine. Looking back on it, what were the odds that an auto dealership manager was really going to take the time to explain a radio promotion to his salespeople? Slim, at best.
I could have shown up at a dealership sales meeting, played the commercial for everyone, told them exactly what to do, and explained how they would benefit. I could have shown up on Saturday morning, taken a few minutes to talk with the salespeople, made sure they remembered that this was the weekend of the big ice cream promotion, and gotten them enthusiastic about it.
I didn’t. The GM had told me he would let everyone know, and that sounded good to me. One less thing for me to worry about.
It would have been easy to blame the store for not executing the promotion properly. But I was the Account Executive. Responsibility for execution was mine.
NINE YEARS LATER
Beaverton Mitsubishi is long gone, but I still drive by the lot on Canyon Road every now and then. Each time I do, I think about the ice cream promotion, and I wince.
Next week I’ll be in the Midwest, and one of my meetings is with the owner of a chain of weight loss clinics. The advertising drives people to their website, where they are supposed to sign up for a consultation. I looked at the site, and found that it takes several unnecessary clicks to get to the signup page, and once I got there the instructions left me confused. People who are confused often do nothing. The website doesn’t pass The Mom Test.
I could just shrug and say, “The TV is doing its job — it’s getting people to the site. It’s not my fault that the site is screwed up.” But I know that’s a cop-out. Next week I’m going to pull the site up on my laptop, show the client exactly where her prospects are getting lost, and tell her what changes she needs to make before her ads go back on the air.
The success of the campaign is our responsibility.
THREE WAYS TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR BUSINESS NOW
1. Spend a few minutes reviewing the upcoming campaigns you’ve sold. Ask what has to happen to make each campaign successful. Is the product in the store? Do the front-line employees know about the promotion? Can the advertiser’s website pass The Mom Test?
2. Begin including a “To Do” list with each presentation. Give the client a list of tasks that must be performed. Agree, in writing, on who will perform each task. Follow up to make sure everything gets done.
3. Start a discussion with your peers. Share this on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
[reminder]Agree with me? Want to argue?[/reminder]
I checked into the Cedar Rapids hotel on a Sunday night in early October, and settled in for the week.
Monday morning, before heading to the TV station, I went down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. Glancing at the menu, I decided to order oatmeal. I don’t always eat properly on the road, but I can usually get in a healthy breakfast before my self-discipline breaks down.
When the oatmeal arrived at my table, it was anything but healthy. The top layer was some kind of custard, and the rest of it was loaded with sugar and other stuff. It tasted quite good, but it did not mean good things for my cholesterol count.
I called the waitress over and asked her whether the restaurant offered just plain oatmeal. She told me that this was the way the restaurant always did it. Then she paused, and asked me how long I was staying at the hotel. I told her I would be there all week.
“My name’s Jackie,” she said. “When you come down tomorrow, ask for me, and I’ll have the chef just make you a bowl of regular oatmeal.”
Tuesday morning I came down to the restaurant and asked for Jackie. “You mentioned you might be able to get me some regular oatmeal,” I said. “Let me see what I can do,” she replied. 10 minutes later she brought me a bowl of plain oatmeal.
Wednesday morning, I waved to her as I sat down. “Oatmeal, and a to-go cup of coffee with the check?” she asked. “Yes,” I replied, surprised that she had remembered about the coffee. Thursday and Friday, we didn’t even have to discuss it. As soon as she saw me, she put the order in with the kitchen. And when she brought the check, the to-go cup of coffee was right there with it.
Three weeks later, I was back in Cedar Rapids at the same hotel. Monday morning, when Jackie saw me she said, “Welcome back, Mr. Bernstein! Plain oatmeal, right?”. The first day, I had to ask for the coffee-to-go; the rest of the week it all went like clockwork.
The reason I was able to get this special treatment is that I stayed in the same place for an extended period of time, and ate at the same restaurant every morning. Seeing the same faces every day, I got to know them and they got to know me. Over time, one of the waitresses got to know exactly what I wanted, and I didn’t have to start over each morning.
While I was at the hotel, I met another business traveler who was in Cedar Rapids for a couple of days. From there, he was going to Des Moines for two days, and then to St. Louis. He was also having his breakfasts in a hotel restaurant – but every couple of days it would be a different restaurant. He had to take whatever was on the menu.
Here’s the advertising lesson:
With limited resources, you have a choice when you decide to advertise:
You can spread your budget out, and try to reach as many people as possible by doing a little bit of a lot of things. You will be advertising frequently. Lots of people will see you, but they won’t remember you.
Or you can take your limited resources and focus them into a small number of places. You will be advertising with frequency. You will reach fewer people — but the people you reach will respond.
The other business traveler — with a couple of days in Cedar Rapids, a couple of days in Des Moines, and a brief stop in St. Louis — had the equivalent of a “media mix.” A little TV, a little radio, a couple of bus sides. He was seen by more people than I was, but he didn’t get to know them and they didn’t get to know him. When he sat down for breakfast, he got what everyone else got.
I had the same resources — five days — but I spent them all in one place. The same people saw me over and over again, and by the end of those five days the wait staff knew me.
The other guy was eating out frequently; I was eating out with frequency. Which one of us did better?
One of the biggest threats to brick-and-mortar retailers in 2012 is “Showrooming”: consumers who walk into a store with a smartphone to look at merchandise and make use of the expertise of the staff… and then make their purchase online from Internet retailer at a lower price.
Conventional wisdom holds that because of the “Showrooming” phenomenon, the Internet is a huge threat to bricks and mortar retailers. There is a great deal of validity to this argument, but an interesting counter-argument has emerged:
Dan Kennedy’s marketing newsletter tipped me off to an article in Internet Retailer Magazine about the opposite phenomenon. The article discusses Patagonia, who saw a great deal of traffic to their iPad app without a corresponding jump in sales via the tablet. Mark Shimahara, Patagonia’s Internet Marketing Manager, initially thought that there was a problem with the app itself.
“But after talking with store managers,” he says, “we realized that people were using the phone application to do their window shopping and would show up at our stores with the device in hand and product on their screens, saying, ‘Do you have this in stock?’ It’s a great example of how we are entering the age of omnichannel marketing.”
Staples Inc. faces a similar situation, though involving small-business owners, the office supply chain’s core customers, says Brian Tilzer, vice president of e-commerce and business development. He says small businesses increasingly use Apple and Android smartphones and even tablets to research products, check inventory and otherwise prepare for what he calls the “in-store shopping experience.”
30% of consumers, the article reports, begin their product search and research on Amazon.com, while another 13% begin that search on Google. Some will buy online, but others will wind up into an honest-to-goodness bricks and mortar store. Maybe yours.
Conclusion? For local business, Internet shopping is both a threat and an opportunity. To make it pay off, you need to have:
A strong online presence. Even if you are not selling over the Internet, you need to be easily found on the Internet.
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The inventory, staff expertise, and customer centric mindset necessary to convert those Internet window shoppers into paying customers when they walk into your store.
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The ability, and the willingness, to aggressively capture customer contact information when they visit your business in person or call on the phone.
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The ability, and the willingness, to follow up with those customers after you have captured their contact information.
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