Assess Corporate Culture When Choosing Your Next Customer
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
It is standard practice to qualify a prospect on the basis of time, need, authority and money, but why not by corporate culture as well? We all find it easier to work with some companies just as we prefer working with some employees more than others. In fact, as a result of outsourcing, with more and more work going to suppliers instead of employees, perhaps the supplier-customer relationship should (and will) start to mimic the employee-employer relationship.
If this is so, then as suppliers, we should start to assess our prospect’s corporate culture just as we did when deciding to accept a company’s job offer. While I’m not recommending pre-relationship psychological testing, we may need to run a relationship check just as we would a credit check. Since people still buy from people (as opposed to companies) some level of compatibility is essential. After all, customer-supplier relationships fail most often because expectations were not set, agreed upon and then met. Some relationships may be already doomed from the start!
So let’s take a few moments and decide whether we are picking good long-term partners or “one-time sales stands.”
- Does the decision-maker communicate like you do?
- Does he/she share some basic values with you?
- Does his/her company make decisions like yours does?
- How are disputes resolved, if they are resolved?
- Is it a conservative or progressive environment in terms of risk-taking, communications, problem solving, partnering?
While sales goals have to be hit, they are rarely accomplished through the first order. Therefore, developing an ideal customer profile before closing that first deal will help ensure that more will follow. Taking a few minutes when moving qualified prospects through the developed or proposal funnel stage before closing them will only enhance the chances of successful long-term partnerships. This profile can easily be added as part of your qualifying customer or pre-proposal questionnaire. Feel free to contact me if you would like some further thoughts on how to do this.
Practice “The One Thing:” Abundance and Scarcity:
Filed under: Business Growth, Pittsburgh, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Remember the movie City Slickers where Jack Palance tells the boys to find “The One Thing!”
What is the one thing for your business? If creating profitable growth sounds right, read on.
Whatever you make and sell, if you practice abundance while offering scarcity, your profitable growth will follow. Why?
First, let’s define abundance and scarcity.
- Abundance is your confidence that there are always more customers with new wants and needs. Your and their glass is always half full.
- Scarcity happens every time you convince buyers that your business is different, better and unlike every other business. Scarce means you are in demand.
Here are five ways to practice abundance and scarcity and create profitable growth.
Five ways to practice abundance
- Move beyond your industry’s certifications and best practices and create your own. Find and follow your own best and highest use. Here’s my YouTube video to show you how.
- Invest in your own business. You will always have too little money or too little time. Your confidence and conviction will have much more to do with your success.
- Donate your time and your money where you believe it will have impact not visibility.
- Give more referrals than you get. Paying it forward works!
- Write, speak, present and react to issues where you are an expert. Social media makes it easy.
Hines Ward, of the Pittsburgh Steelers is a great example of living an abundant life. At this writing, he’s a finalist on Dancing with the Stars. What is next for Hines?
Our two-party system, which boils most issues down to destructive platforms and sound bites, is the opposite of abundance.
Five ways to practice scarcity
- Be truly independent and unbiased in your advice and build all the trust you can with your clients.
- Find the extraordinary in the ordinary and give your customers unique ways to accomplish what they want to.
- Discover, propose and sell third and fourth alternatives to problems when everyone else sees only one or two.
- Say no to cutting your price, accepting bad business and indulging bullying or non-paying clients.
- Be fun and still get the job done. Work hard, play hard! Make people need you.
Barbara Streisand, Cher and Madonna rarely tour but always sell out when they do. They are great examples of scarcity.
Creative advertisements for GEICO, Progressive, State Farm and Allstate Insurance come so fast and often we forget who made which ad and sells what brand. Not scarce at all!
Combine Your Scarcity and Abundance and They Will Create Profitable Growth.
Being scarce with an abundance mentality comes down to having the unconscious and innate confidence that you can make life better for your customers and clients than any of your competitors or they themselves can. Practice practicing scarcity and abundance. When you do so, profitable growth will follow because your customers will connect you with their successes and will not be able to duplicate this with your competitors. And they will be willing to buy more from you and pay you more for it. And that is profitable growth!
Shout Out or Shout At Your Sales Force? Is It Generating Sales Growth in the New Economy?
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Uncategorized
Hopefully, your business has been getting better, and you are reporting increased sales. Why? Who deserves the credit? What is your sales force saying?
Like Captain “Sully” Sullenberger, does your sales team humbly acknowledge the whole company did the right things and luck had something to do with it.
Or, are they more like Libyan rebels victoriously firing their guns skyward celebrating their victory over Gadhafi regardless of NATO’s “shock and awe”?
What is your sales force’s self awareness, and more importantly what is the truth?
Despite your sales group’s humility or hubris, no one can control changes in your buyer’s behavior or marketplace forces.
Here are the three ways to gain insight:
1. How did your customers learn about your firm? Call the decision-making buyers and ask them why they decided to buy now. What did the customer initially want and what did your rep say that finally made them buy? If the buyer refers you to other influencers or don’t mention your sales rep, then their buying process has changed and you need to understand why and how.
2. How did your firm learn about these new customers? It takes 12 “contacts” or “touches” to close a new client including your advertising, traditional and electronic mail, referrals, reference checks and internet research. How did your company connect to the decision maker?
3. What did your sales rep do to prospect, qualify, develop and close his or her new customer? Was he or she a former, dormant customer or a brand new one? Was the decision made by the same buyer, department, and using the same criteria as before? Did it change during the selling cycle?
As Bob Dylan once sang, the times they are a changing, it’s highly likely that understanding and reconfirming changes in the customer’s buying process is critical. Here are four questions to answer.
- Has the buyer, reasons or criteria changed?
- Has the distribution changed?
- Does the product need to be repriced, turned into a service or unbundled?
- Has the target market changed, moved or disappeared?
There may never be a substitute for personal face-to-face selling in your business. Or is there a major change in how important and when it is the right thing? In the era of young people texting, internet and voice mail, you don’t want to be the last to know that you have a Willy Loman-style, “Death of a Sales Force”, holding your company back.
Go Ahead, Try Buying From Us!
As hard as business is, why do some of your suppliers act like they’re disgruntled TSA workers giving you a “pat-down” just for trying to do business with them? Whether it’s your delivery, raw material or purchased services, we’ve all had vendors who just won’t let us:
- Buy more for a better price
- Pay faster for a discount
- Commit longer for predictable service
How can so many firms still have such big blind spots? Is there any way your firm is making it too hard to buy from?
- Can your salespeople easily sell everything your customers need?
- Will your customer service group resolve all the issues a buyer raises?
- Do your account managers offer many ways for customers to buy more from you?
In total frustration, we’ve all just given up and stopped buying from a company. How can you be sure your customers don’t do this to you?
No company ever tries to offend customers. But many firms get so busy they just assume they still know their customers. Relying on harried customer service and reduced sales forces cannot provide unbiased feedback. Just as marriages are saved by when a third party hears, listens and translates what one party really means, here are three ways you can get the deep understanding you need.
- Have your peers “secret shop” your business. Find two friendly competitors outside of your territory. Give one clear instructions on what to buy and what demands to make and another absolutely no guidance. Then, watch and listen to what happens during the transaction and afterwards. And do so from both your side and theirs. Finally reciprocate and secret shop your competitor for your peer. You will learn just as much by repaying the favor.
- Deputize key customers to shop your problems. Recruit three loyal customers and ask them to create “a problem” you need solved. After their experience in trying to get it resolved by your team, bring the customers and your team together to debrief on it. If you treat it like the TV show, “Candid Camera” it can be a fun time for all concerned as well as a great teaching moment.
- Hire an expert to match what your company sells with what customers buy. Investing in a professional trained to uncover customer concerns always uncovers new profit opportunities and will impress your clients. To watch a video of my methodologies click here.
If you know your customers’ true feelings your firm can remain their “go-to” vendor. What else would you want your customers to say?
Get Sold and Get Going on Creating Your Sales Engineers
In an era where buyers need complete confidence in their business relationships, most favor vendors they can trust to provide the most understandable and least risky solutions possible. This is not surprising considering how much new technology and science is now built into most products and services they buy. And there’s much more on the way. The US News and World Report’s latest report of top careers shows why. Nearly every emerging job is in a narrow technical specialty that is exponentially creating knowledge that will need to be understood by untrained or educated buyers.
Capable buyers know they must process technical information that’s flooding in from all sides. To do so they will need more interpreters, advisers and reconcilers who can instill confidence by comfortably explaining how a technical product meets a layman’s objectives. But from where? In business it seems there is a widening gap between those who can invent technology and those who buy the results of technology. Historically only large corporations have employed staff who are technically educated, can sell product features, and then train a user in how to make money. These “sales engineers” who can leverage and communicate what they know have always been in great demand. But smart business owners like you have always served as your firm’s “sales engineer. You can seize this opportunity if you find and train sales people to sell like you do. Your sales ability, product knowledge and confidence built your business and its success. Now it is time to pay your knowledge forward. To profitably grow to the next level, you need to leverage your expertise and experience through your emerging employees. So take the cue of the sales engineer. You’re your most empathetic people and enhance their grasp of your products or take your technicians who are friendly and communicative and give them more opportunities to teach, train and sell.
In an environment where more things are being bought by buyers only as needed rather than being than sold to consumers acting on impulse, the best way to increase your sales and protect your margins is to sell your expertise and improving the experience of your customer. Do this by teaching and projecting what you do before it’s too late.
Three Ways To Ensure Your Social Media Efforts Create Profitable Growth
Recently, I ranted about how blogging and tweeting are often incompatible with generating qualified leads or closed sales (“To Tweet or to Sell”).
But if you run a business, how do you know if your tweeting and blogging are making you money?
To read the rest go HERE.
This article is published on the AMERICAN EXPRESS OPEN Small Business Forum.
Make This Your Most Profitable Year Ever – Profitability Tips
Recently, Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends interviewed me during our recent webinar and came up with several excellent ideas for you including 45 ways you can improve your profitability in 2010. Read More….
Achieving Your Best and Highest Use®
Best and Highest Use® is when you look at your company and its impact on your customers. Is it still helping resolve their pain, achieve their opportunities, and succeed as much as it used to?
Or despite continuing to deliver more and more are your customers paying you less and less?
Watch my video on Achieving Your Best and Highest Use®
Is Your Price Right?
Filed under: Business Growth, Profitable Growth, Top Line Growth
Pricing has always been one of the greatest games in business. In times of scarcity, this is ever so true. The price you offer has to reflect value, convey trust and cover costs of sales, delivery, and unfortunately, collections. And you have to be able to get your price.
How do you know when a price is right? Let’s say that you meet a prospect for lunch in an attempt to close a deal. When you finally come to the point of stating your price, one of three things happens:
• Your prospect immediately says no, stands, and walks away.
• Your prospect immediately says yes, shakes your hand, and treats you, the waiter, and everyone at the surrounding tables to champagne.
• Your prospect contemplates the offer. The long silence feels like an ocean in your head until you hear that magical word: Yes!
In two of the three situations you closed the deal, but only in the third have you done it right. If the prospect rejects the offer out of hand, he believes the price is too high, which means that you have failed to sell the benefits of what your company provides. If the prospect takes the offer immediately, you have given away too much value for too low a price; your prospect feels like he’s discovered a Van Gogh original at a garage sale! You know you’ve got it right when your prospect accepts your offer only after some deliberation. In this case, he knows the value he is losing if he says no. Ultimately, your price is your demonstration of value. If you are getting your price in difficult times, congratulations, for you are truly valued for your value.
Triggering Trust
Before the great recession, business trust was easier to earn and bestow. Taking a chance on a new vendor or offering your prospect a sweetheart deal was good business and could be fun. There was a stronger connection between gaining a one time buyer and turning him or her into a loyal customer. These days, earning small business trust is harder so knowing the triggering events in your business is ever more critical. So what is a trigger event?
There is that moment in a new relationship when two people, formerly strangers, share an expectation of being together every Saturday night. The new toothbrush in the medicine cabinet … Brunch with the parents … Wandering together into a jewelry store and ending up in front of the diamond rings. Coincidence? No. It’s a trigger event.
Trigger events signify relationship milestones. In terms of prospects and customers, we can locate common triggers in order to predict behavior and offer them what they need when they are ready. Common trigger events include:
• The third sale
• The second problem (resolved to satisfaction)
• The fourth reorder
• The third season
• The second referral
These vary by industry, so you may find a different pattern with your customers. Study your data and nail down typical buying patterns. Begin by defining which products or services:
• New buyers are likely to choose first.
• Encourage the most return purchases.
• Are one-time impulse buys.
• Are most popular with existing customers.
In an age where relationships take longer to build or repair, understanding what triggers business trust and thus customer loyalty is ever more important. Know your customers’ trigger points, focus on building their trust and you will earn their loyalty.
