Selling Beyond The Sale
The main goal is always to get the sale agreed. To get the buyer to say “yes” and specify when delivery will take place. All of the efforts are concentrated here but is that enough? Over promising by salespeople is legendary. They do this to get the sale over the line. The potential damage to the brand is not in their minds because that is not their department. “Production, Logistics, Marketing and Customer Care need to take care of that stuff, my job is just get the deal done”. This thinking is a pact with the devil in sales and leads to a lot of heartaches down the road.
The supreme focus on the sale is a big mistake. As I always keep harping on, it isn’t the sale we should be focused on - it should be the next sale, the reorder, the next assignment. The current sales discussion we are having with the buyer needs to be mindful of the value we have claimed being substantiated by what we deliver. That means we don’t blow up the supply elements of the company to make them do the impossible, in ridiculous timeframes, because that is when problems will arise around quality. We do what we can to make the client happy but we don’t drag our brand through the blood and the mud to do one deal.
Reputation in the market is everything. A client pressured me to cut some corners on our quality to satisfy some costs calculations. I told the client that If we do it this way there will be pushback and unhappiness. He wasn’t phased in the least and wanted it go ahead anyway. I was mesmerised by the opportunity of a new sale and a new client and went along. What I didn’t think about at the time was that for him there was no risk. I was carrying all the risk because this was my brand and not his in the firing line.
It was a mess as I predicted, but again he wasn’t phased. I wasn’t happy because by now it had dawned on me that my brand had just taken a hammering. At my cost and my insistence, we re-did the training for his senior people. I thought I had recovered the situation. Go forward five years later when one of my staff visits that same company, who by this stage is four presidents and HR directors down the succession line. Does he hear the whole scrambled original poor plan was their idea, that we went back in at our cost and fixed it? No, instead the corporate memory over there is we were sub-standard in our delivery. Ouch!
I didn’t see beyond the sale by thinking about the high cost of short money. I just went with the President’s wishes, when I should have just said “no” and walked away if he didn’t like it. We are still hear paying the price and he isn't even in Japan or with that company anymore.
I learnt my lesson. A start-up founder had me meet the whole senior team and him finally. They are very successful and doing well, but they have grown so fast they have outstripped their leadership capability and are losing good people as a result. I had what they needed. However when I met the President, I realised this guy doesn't care about people. He told me he was really focused on HR issues and building a team. As I spoke with him I realised his rhetoric and his real thinking didn’t match up though. To him they were just interchangeable parts in his machine and he can just switch them in and out as he needs to.
On purpose, I let that business just slide off the table, because I knew the fish rots from the head and no matter what we did, it would have zero impact. Being blamed for having zero impact is not a brand builder and I walked away from the precipice. I don’t know what happened after that, but I do know whoever took on that work will have faced a train wreck and they will have been the first casualty. I could see there was no possibility to sell beyond the sale and we were better to leave that time bomb well alone.
Dealing With Really Tough and Mean Questions From Clients
When we give our presentation to the client we are in full control of the situation. We know what we are going to say. When we get to the end, or part way through, and the client asks us a really tough question, this can be difficult to deal with. Especially, if the client is unhappy and asks the question in a very aggressive or accusatory manner, we can easily react emotionally. The normal response for human beings in these cases can be the release of chemicals into the body to get ready for flight or fight. This is how we survived from cavemen days when confronted by a sabre toothed tiger and it still applies today. Regardless of our species roots, we have to make sure we keep our control and a cool head. This is not so easy sometimes.
Apart from our release of chemicals into the body, we find our mind can often become confused, as we try to think of the best way to respond to the client. We usually never know when we are going to be hit with a tough question, asked in an angry or aggressive manner. The surprise factor is one of the reasons we have trouble knowing how to respond. If we know the client can be difficult, then we can mentally prepare ourselves. We need to have a plan. It is when the client is new and unknown, or a known client suddenly behaving unpredictably, we find ourselves getting into trouble.
Because of the random nature of these occurrences, it means we need to consider this possibility before every meeting. We should consider what might be some issues the client may raise with us and think about how we should answer them. When we get hit with a tough question from the client, we can quickly find ourselves on the defensive, trying to think about why what they said isn’t true or why the the scale of the problem isn’t as large as they say it is. We need to consider those answers beforehand and we should also prepare some positive messages, to get ourselves back on the front foot and in control of the conversation.
The other area we need to pay attention to is our body language. We may show to the client that we are lacking in confidence or that we are scared of what they said (or the way they said it) or that we are becoming defensive and dismissive of their opinion. We need to mask this body language and maintain a cool, calm and collected appearance, totally unfazed by what they have just said. This makes us look more confident and credible.
Handling objections needs the use of the “cushion”. We inject a short neutral statement into the conversation to buy us thinking time. We want go to that part of our brain where we have a better response ready to deal with the pushback. Before we attempt to answer the objections however, we should ask clarifying questions. “Thank you for mentioning that. May I ask why you say that?”. And then we shut up and don’t add, revise, or adjust what we have just said. We want the client to give us more detail. We need to nail down precisely what is their problem, before we open our mouth and begin offering solutions. So often though, salespeople jump right in and try to answer a problem they haven’t fully isolated yet. It well may be there has been a misunderstanding or there has been some miscommunication. We need to know about that before we try to respond.
For formulating our response, here is are seven things to keep in mind.
In this case, the best defence is offense. If we are thinking ahead, anticipating trouble and preparing for it, we will always do better. We need to stop reacting and start responding to the client, when things get a bit rough and tough.
How Good Are Your Key Touch Points In Sales?
Jan Carlzon’s book “Moments Of Truth” should be standard reading for everyone in business and particularly those of us in sales. He talks about taking over as CEO of the Scandinavian Air Services (SAS) airline when the company was failing and had terrible consumer reviews, regarding their service. With his team, they identified every touch point on the customer journey with the airline, to discover where the gaps were located. We should be doing the same with our business.
Now you might be thinking that is the CEOs job, not the work of a humble salesperson. You would be wrong!!! The client sees you as their guy or gal inside your company and they expect you to fix everything for them. That includes fixing things before they even become a problem.
The marketing department takes care of the website, the social media, the advertising, the collateral materials, etc. As a salesperson, you won’t have much input into that degree of detail. Nevertheless feedback what you are hearing from clients, so that marketing can do a better job of representing the firm to the buyers. As a salesperson, you can take care of your own social media and make sure that any materials you present to the client are up to date and in pristine condition.
Clients do a lot of shopping on-line before they meet us today and that includes looking at our own social media. What are they going to find? You in a club doing the limbo dance, dressed in board shorts and a T-shirt, totally off your face and looking outrageous? Or you in a business suit, looking professional and plausible as a business partner? You can’t control marketing’s activities, but you can control what you put up on social media and therefore you can control your own professional image.
For example, I have two Facebook accounts – one for business with around 5000 people connected to me and one for my karate mates, with about 30 people on it. I have 24,000 followers on LinkedIn and the content is always professionally related to subjects around leadership, sales, communication and presenting, because that is what we sell. I try to control what buyers see of me before we ever meet.
When people call your company, what do they hear? In Japan, in 99.999% of cases, the person answering the phone won’t venture forth their name, is not pleasant, happy you called or excited to do some business with a possible new commercial partner. They are guarded, cautious, stiff and sound like they hate their job. First impression management in Japan is a concept that hasn’t hit these shores as yet. Well now, how do you answer the phone yourself? Are you very “business-like”, that is, you sound serious, terse and unfriendly? Get your phone Voice Memo app ready and the next time you answer the office phone, tape yourself and play it back – you might be shocked at how unhelpful you sound forming that vital first impression with your initial greetings.
When you send emails do you have a signature block bursting with contact information so the client doesn’t have to do any work to find your contact details? How do you start the email? Are you straight down to business or do you try to build some rapport? Japan has some set pieces here, but that is the problem, everyone uses them, so people’s eyes glaze over and they don’t bother reading the first couple of sentences. I have disciplined myself to make the first word of every email I send start with the word “thanks”, whether it is outbound or in reply. I never get these types of greetings myself, so I know it is differentiated and not common. That is good. I want to stand out in a crowded field of people selling to my buyers.
We can’t go through every touch point in this piece, but at least let’s start thinking about how many touch points we have with clients and what is the current quality level like? Look at how can we improve the current reality and how to maintain a consistent professional level of interaction with buyers. When your competitors are just doing the same old, same old, you win.
Happy Holidays! How To Massacre Your Brand Promise
The end of year holiday season is a time of great retail commercial activity around the world. Brands work well because they bring with them a promise of reliability and trust. We buy the brands over the non-brands to reduce risk and increase our certainty that our buying decision is a good one. The issue for firms is how to protect the brand image during the provision of service component of the brand promise. Those at the top in the executive suites and those deep in the guts of the organisation, in the marketing department in particular, are really “on brand” no doubt. What about the rest of the organisation? There are lessons here for all of us in sales, when the big boys and girls get it wrong.
Many years ago, on holiday, I bought a very nice watch in the Versace Piazza di Spagna store in Rome. I have been quite a Versace fan over the years and have a lot of gear from them. The leather band broke a few years ago and through the good offices of the store here in Tokyo, it was sent off to the headquarters to be repaired. Recently, the same thing happened with the leather band again, but the outcome this time was a brand destroying, rather than brand enhancing experience.
I took my watch to the main Versace store in Ginza, to have the leather band replaced. The staff member told me that they don’t have that type of leather band in stock, so get lost. I persevered and asked about the possibility of sending it to the headquarters to repair it there. A few minutes later, the shop manager informs me that they can’t do that, because the operator of the Versace store in Japan is a different company to the one in Italy, same brand but a different store ownership structure. As the buyer this is puzzling. We buy the brand, we don’t care about the inner workings of the company providing the service or about their rules and procedures. The store manager in effect tells me to buzz off.
Subsequently, I began thinking about my own business. This type of thing irritates me because the staff on the ground don’t care that I am loyal customer, because I am not a loyal customer of their shop, because I bought this watch overseas. In our own case, what systems do we have in place in Japan for serving international Dale Carnegie customers, because we are a franchise organisation with many separate companies around the globe, operating under the same brand. Are we able to take care of the buyer, regardless of where they have interacted with us in the past or currently interact with us somewhere in the world. Would my staff do the same thing and apply that Japanese company worker mentality of “no accountability”, if a problem arose?
It gets worse for Versace, because realising I am dealing with idiots in the Ginza store, who appear to be Versace staff, but actually aren’t Versace employees, I go the main website. I find the contact information and I compose a very nice note expressing my long love affair with the brand, this watch in particular and my inability to get it fixed in Japan and asking what I should do next. I get an immediate automated response telling me they have my mail and will get back to me. I wait three weeks and get nothing back from them.
This is the issue with systems to deal with problems. If the client has a problem we have to fix it. The buyer bought the brand promise and if we provide different avenues for dealing with buyer problems, then they have to work properly. The correct response from the store staff should have been “we are Versace, we individually will take responsibility for the brand, we will fix your problem and hopefully you will continue to love our brand and buy something from our Ginza store”.
It begs the question, are my staff taking full responsibility to fix problems for buyers? As the boss, you never even hear about these issues, because the matter is never drawn to your attention and you are super busy anyway. Japanese staff are all ninja at hiding problems from the boss, so you really have to work hard to find out what is really happening. So, on reflection, have I properly guided them on our philosophy toward the buyer? Am I assuming too much knowledge and when was the last time I talked to my team about this type of customer care?
A lot of money is spent on websites and all and good, but the service component behind the pepper and spice on screen has to be in place. There has to be a human being somewhere receiving the email, reading it and then taking action. Can we be sure in our own cases, that when buyers send us an email, that the people designated to receive it are doing their job? How can we check up on this type of on-line service? Do we have the protocols in place to do so? Automated responses are easy to build, but the “care” factor in the mentality of the staff servicing the client, is a lot more complex to create.
The upshot is I went back to the contact page and sent another note and again got the automated response. So far, no response from any human being, but I live in hope. How do I feel about the Versace shops in Japan, who are Versace, but aren’t really? I doubt I will ever cross their boutique portal again in my life. Will I buy the brand again? Probably not and certainly I will never buy another watch from them.
When we are the seller, what are we doing to make sure this outcome doesn’t happen to us? What are our systems? What are our checking mechanisms? What are our protocols? How well have we trained the staff to think ONE company, ONE brand, rather than a myriad of branches, with various corporate holding structures.
Brand is building trust, but when the trust is lost, the brand is lost. Vale Versace.