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It Doesn’t End With the Sale: Managing Customer Relationships0

The Pipeline Guest Post – Megan Totka

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and attracting new customers while strengthening your relationships with existing ones is a constant challenge. The best way to do so, however, is a matter that often leaves your sales and marketing staff at odds. Your sales force is focused primarily on closing the deal and landing new customers, while your marketing department wants to nurture customer relationships before and after the sale. No matter what your role at your company, however, it’s to your benefit to continue to nurture customer relationships long after they’ve paid their invoices.

Why Long-Term Customer Relationships Matter

We’ve all heard the adage that it’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a new one. After all, you’ve already done the wooing. They already love your brand. If you maintain the relationship, they’ll come back to buy other products or services from you, increasing their customer lifetime value.

A customer with whom you already have a relationship is more likely to refer more business to you. They’re happy to tell others about how much they enjoy your brand when communicating through social media, review sites like Yelp, and face to face with friends. A single customer can help attract business from friends and family if they’re happy. And the best way to keep your customers happy is by paying attention to their needs and staying connected.

Managing Your Customer Relationships

Customer relationship management tools like Insightly and Salesforce make it easy to create profiles for each of your customers. You can track critical data like purchases, each customer’s birthday, and communication preferences. Companies use this data to better engage with customers. If you have your customer’s birthday, you can send her a email with a special birthday offer. If you know she has looked repeatedly at a certain item on your website, you can offer her a discount for it. Building a profile is a great first step; if you are in regular contact with a client, take notes each time you speak with them.

Social media is another fantastic tool for staying on top of customer relationships. Since Hootsuite lets you set up custom streams based on your preferences, it’s a snap to set up a stream containing the social media content generated by all your customers. From there, it’s up to you how far you drill down. You could create streams for different types of customers, such as those buying women’s clothes in one stream, children’s clothing in another, and men’s clothes in the last stream. You could set up a search for a keyword that relates to your industry to see who’s talking about it, and connect with them. The possibilities are endless, but what matters is using the info you gather to enhance your customer relationships.

Once you’ve set up customer profiles, it’s simply a matter of paying careful attention to what’s being said, especially if it relates to your product or brand. If a customer’s unhappy with your company, they might not bother to tell you, but reach out on their social network instead. If you’re monitoring your customer Tweets using your new setup, it’s much easier to discover customer concerns—and address them—before the situation escalates.

From a more positive angle, if you notice a customer tweeting about her search for product or service you provide (that they may not realize you offer), your sales team has a fantastic opportunity to respond and develop that interest into a lead.

Email is another great way to stay on connected to your customer. Don’t bombard your customers with emails, but do make your emails frequent and relevant enough to remind them of why they chose to give you their business. Sending one newsletter and one promotional email at specific times each week or month is a good start, but with a little creativity and careful data management, you can create targeted email campaigns for special occasions or broken out by demographic. Using the data gleaned through your customer relationship management software, you can deliver even more sophisticated and targeted messages, such as discounts for a customer’s birthday for example. The better targeted the offers, the better your connection with your customers.

The aim is to keep growing the connection. With intelligent application of the information you gather, you can build real and lasting relationships with your customers that won’t end with the sale.

About Megan Totka

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

Conditions Are Not Objections (#video)0

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

In the heat of a sale, it is sometimes easy to confuse a condition to the sale with an objection. The key is to understand what you are really dealing with, and respond accordingly. Done right, it could solidify the sale and the resulting relationship with the buyer.

Take a look, then download the Objection Handling Handbook, and let me know your thought.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Why Are You In Sales? – Sales eXchange 20020

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

At the end of this post I will ask you a specific question that I would love you to answer, and I thank you here in advance.

Two things happened this past week or 10 days that led to this week’s Sales eXchange being a bit different than the usual, and isn’t that what we always strive to be in sales. First is the fact that this is the 200th Sales eXchange post, and while I had given it much thought, someone asked if I will be marking the fact in any way. The person that asked me was a young person at an event I participated in recently. The event was organized to present young people with different options for their life after school.

One of the questions going into the event was “What do you want to be?” Some had very clear ideas, knowing exactly where they want to go. One young lady was determined to become a speech pathologist due to a friend she had in grade school. She structured her high school curriculum to set her up for a path of success in post-secondary school, and to her dream career. Others stated a number of different career plans, some very specific, marketing, finance, construction, software design, and more. Others were a bit more general, the young man who asked about the 200th post simply stated business. As an aside, it seems he had been spying my blog (and others) to glean ideas for his high school business class, at least someone is getting value at an early age. But in the end no one said they wanted to go into sales, not one.

Consider that according to the United States Department of Labor, there just under 14 million people employed in sales as of May 2012 in the USA. The same department pegs the number of lawyers at under 1 million, and software developers (systems and applications) also under 1 million. Yet fewer than a handful of institutions offer a degree in selling or sales.

There were a number of kids who talked about becoming lawyers, software developers, doctors, even golf pros, but not one said sales. Which begs the question that if no one sets out to become a sales professional, where the hell did we all come from? Are we progressing as a profession, or just a modern day version of post war refugee camps full of people making due while they find their next destination? Are we a repository of other professions outcasts, with the occasional diamond in the rough? After all, almost 50% of sellers do not make quota, this would not be tolerated in any other department.

So here is my ask – take a minute and think about where you are in sales as a career, how you got here, how you’re doing. Then take a minute and in the comment box below, tell me:

Why Are You In Sales?

Tibor Shanto

What if you could defeat the Status Quo0

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

All this week I have posted clips from a recent interview with Ago Cluytens, for his Coaching Masters Series. We dealt with a number of issues around selling to buyers who are traditionally referred to as being Status Quo. Being the weekend, I thought it a good time to post the whole interview for your weekend lounging pleasure.

Always interested in what you think, and whether you are more prepared to go forth and sell where many sellers and pundits fear to go. Take a look, and let me know.

If you enjoy this there are more on Ago’s site.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

Apr 27th, 2013 Ability, Accountability, Action, Attitude, Business Acumen, Buying Process, Change Management, Client Life Cycle, Communication Strategy, Don't Wait, EDGE Sales Process, Emotion, Emotional Intelligence(EQ), Events, execution, Gap Selling, Interactive Selling, Interview, Leadership, Listening, Next Steps, Planning, Play to Win, Proactive Triggers, Sales Interview, Sales Leadership, Sales Process, Sell Better, Selling to Executives, Status Quo, Trigger Events, Triggers, Video

Accountability, Attitude, Change Management, Client Life Cycle, Commitment, Communication, Don't Wait, EDGE Sales Process, execution, how to sell better, Interview, Listening, Planning, Play to Win, Proactivity, Renbor Sales Solutions Inc., Sales Process, Sales Success, sell better, Selling to Executives, Trigger Event Selling, Trigger Events, Triggers, Video

Using Social Media to “Prep” Customers for a Sale0

The Pipeline Guest Post – Megan Totka

Social media websites are a great sales and marketing tool, there’s no denying it. I would venture to say that most companies have a presence on at least one social media site, and if they don’t, they should! Many companies are developing marketing campaigns that are design for both online and traditional marketing. For the online marketing aspect, they are normally specifically designed for use on social media sites. Ideally, these campaigns will lead to increased sales for the company.

But how exactly should you use social media to entice your customers to make a purchase? There are quite a few ways to go about it –

Use Photos and Video – social media sites are very photo-centric. There are so many sites out there that encourage users to take photographs of nearly everything they do. Some examples would include Instagram, Pinterest, and Flickr. By taking and posting attractive photos of your products or services, you are more likely to catch people’s attention than by just describing with words. Like it or not, we have become a much more visually-driven society since the advent of social media.

Promote Specific Events – Company events can draw a good deal of attention from customers. These events don’t even have to be sales-related. One of the main goals in sales is just to keep the name of your company or product on your current or potential customers’ minds, right? For example, take TOMS A Day Without Shoes campaign. Is going barefoot for a day going to encourage people to buy shoes? Probably not. But, it does give TOMS a ton of publicity and perhaps people who have not looked at their company before will take notice.

Feature Satisfied Customers – the great thing about social media is that your customers have the ability to give instant feedback. If you like what they have to say, give them a shout-out on your page. You may even get lucky and they may become a brand advocate. This can be really helpful for other customers who have not yet bought from you. When they see positive feedback, it might give them reason to buy. For example, if someone writes a great review of a product, that might be able to sway someone who was on the fence before into giving the product a try.

Build Anticipation – this is particularly important if you are planning to introduce a new product or service. You know when you watch television, sometimes you see commercials for stores or restaurants that don’t have locations near you? Then when one opens nearby, you often feel compelled to check it out. For me, this happened with Kohl’s. They advertised the store in my area for several months before one finally opened. The same goes for the social media world. Prep your customers for new and exciting products or services before they launch. This way, the hype will already be there when you do release the new product.

Social media can be a great way to get customers involved in your business and to close sales. Use it early and use it often!

(Photo Source)

About Megan Totka

Megan Totka is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. She specializes on the topic of small business tips and resources. ChamberofCommerce.com helps small businesses grow their business on the web and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.

Selling In The Right Time Frame – Sales eXchange 1962

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

One common theme here and at other quality sales sources, is the need to cover the entire buying organization, top down, bottom up, and all sides. This not only eliminates the need to go around or over someone, but delivers a number of benefits and opportunities to sell and establish contacts and relationships. Over the years there has been a lot written about the need for sellers to be “multi-lingual” in order to properly communicate with all levels of the buying organization. Executives/decision makers/VPs in your target organization speak a differently than say the implementers or users of the product even when they are talking about the same thing. If one or both do not understand what you are saying it is a problem. When you call a on a VP, and deliver your message in implementer speak, you risk being banished down in the organization, because that is what you sound like, where you may be stuck for a while, extending you sales cycle, or forever, and never getting the sale.

Understanding how to communicate with the different groups, what their specific drivers, issues and hot buttons are, is a must, especially when they have viable alternatives to your offering, and they always do. As you master this you will learn that not only do these groups speak different languages, they function in different time planes, which means you will also need to learn how to exist in multiple time frames.

VP’s will tend to have a longer time horizon than implementers. In a very general way, there are those focused on strategy and the strategic direction of the company. Once those strategies are decided and set, and things begin to move to the tactical execution of the strategy, as a result the time horizons of the implementers is shorter. If you fail to manage this, it could be much more fatal than the language issue. In fact mastering the different time frames will directly help with language, if you know where they are focused, you can speak to it, but if you are positioning for a different time than they are looking at, you are bound to miscommunicate.

If you look at the continuum of a purchase, it is likely that someone had an idea for a product or an initiative at the executive level. They will then gauge support among their peers, while helping to shape the big picture. They may then have some of the team leaders scope things out, costs/benefits, challenges, etc.; this may include consulting with outside parties, a great opportunity to introduce your company long before vendor selection process starts. Once the project gets the go ahead, the implementers take centre stage.

Goes without saying that if you can insert yourself in the process at the scoping stage or before, you would have a great advantage, one reason to call high in the organization. But if you speak the wrong language, and talk about feature/benefit, you in the wrong time frame, and in the wrong “country”.

Another advantage to getting in early, will be your ability to influence and impact their strategy, and with that done, you will be in a much better position when it comes to vendor selection, after all, you’re “a safe choice” vis-à-vis the executive, and while price will always be an issue, you will have set the standard much earlier in the process, or if you will time frame.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

What are you Listening To? (Part I)2

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Ask a group of sales people what are the most important attribute or abilities a good sales person needs to master, and “Listening Skills” will usually be near the top of the list. No argument here, the ability and as importantly the patience to listen are crucial. Beyond the common aspects of listening, there is the issue of what you are listening to. Based on the question, you could find yourself doing a lot of great listening, with little progress, or return for the effort.

So while listening is a good discipline, the skill still comes down to the quality of the question. Great questions make for worthwhile listening; crappy questions lead to… well you know.

Buyers have become immune to the most often asked common questions, some may have been fresh the first time they were asked, but by the third time they were asked “if you could change one thing….?” Or any other question of this sort, they develop a standard canned answer, which if not deflected by the seller, will lead to the same predictable outcome, no sale or discounted sale, I guess that’s the penalty for bad questions.

If you want something good to listen to, you need to ask good questions, the better the question, the better listening, the better the engagement. Where there is a range of opinions is around what is a good question. From where I sit, you need ask questions that penetrate the protective shield buyers have developed to protect themselves from the usual lot of overtly self-serving questions sellers ask, of course delivered in a consultative mode.

The questions need to be provocative, spark the buyer to think, at times shock them into thinking. Think of even though a buyer has granted you an hour, they still have a 16 hour work day they are trying get in to a ten hour day, with all the challenges that go along with that. Just like we as sellers are thinking (and listening) ahead of where we are, so are they. Your question need to stop them in their track, get off the tread mill, and actually think about their answers, not just illicit a response, responses don’t make for good listening.

Unfortunately, people don’t like to provoke, they fear making client uncomfortable, so instead they ask Namby-pamby questions, soft and cuddly, almost asking the buyer to be their friend rather than an agent of change, or a person of value. These kind of soft light questions ultimately lead to light listening, like Muzak at the supermarket.

You can build more provocative questions that help you get below the surface of the issues, getting to the root of what the buyer’s objective are and how you can help eliminate hurdle, identify gaps, and mine those gaps to close them in helping the achieve those objective. The goal is to get past the here and now, to where they need/want to be, where you can add value. To do that you need something good to listen to.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

An Empty Wagon – Sales eXchange 1943

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

We have all heard the expression that an empty wagon makes the most noise, no doubt from an older relative trying to tell us that that we were talking a lot, saying very little of substance, worth hearing, or had as near the level of impact as the noise we were making saying it. Well, I can tell you that there are a lot of empty wagons when it comes to sales and sellers, usually in lack of substance or delivering on the hype.

You see this when sellers embrace half of an idea, usually the easy half, but fail to follow through on the entire concept and end up making a lot of noise as a result. Specifically in the early stages of the sale, when they resort to talking about how their product/service will improve Productivity, increase efficiencies, reduce Costs, minimize Risk, enhance their work-flow, and a few other generic variations of the same thing.

The half they bought into is the need to go beyond feature – benefit, and venture forth to where they are presenting their offering from the “what’s in it for the client” perspective. Where they fail to follow through, is in adding specific substance to the above phrases, leaving them beige and generic. This unnecessarily extends the length of their sale cycle, or kills the sale all together.

Picture yourself as the person getting the calls, dozens of calls every week, from the copier rep, the wireless rep, the IT integrator rep, the office supply rep, the transportation rep, the sales training rep, and the oodles of other reps. All telling you that they CAN improve your productivity, not HOW they could do that, what the actual impact would be, but just that they can improve your productivity. Multiple that by all the “buzz-phrases” and by the number of calls, and by Tuesday afternoon, it all sounds like an empty wagon.

It takes little extra effort to replace the generic phrases with actual example. How do you in fact increase efficiencies, what has been the actual impact of that increased productivity, and how can you best present it in a way that the buyer can relate to in their world. All you need to do is go past where marketing leaves you, and study some real world examples, be they your customers specifically, or any client your company has helped. Understand what their reality was before they used your product and service, and where they after taking your offering on board. Yes, this requires effort, but in the end a lot less effort than the effort it take to push things up the generic hill, the hill where you and every other generic rep looks frighteningly the same and unappealing.

You will quickly move from saying “we help companies like yours increase your efficiency…” to “clients implementing our software have seen an average increase of 8% in the number of units produced per hour, with a reduction of 5% in rejected product, and a 6% reduction in materials used; this has allowed them to increase revenues by 7%, and a 10% rise in profit margin as a result of cost take out”. Sure there are a couple of extra words, but the substance, weight and specifics they communicate to a potential buyer are more direct and make a lot less noise than the emptiness of the generic descriptions used by most.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

The Pipeline Guest Post – Zoe Maldonado

Cutting overhead costs is one of the best ways to help your business succeed. With many businesses, the expenses are far easier to control than the profits. Cutting overhead doesn’t only help you on a financial level, but it also simplifies the management of your business. Cutting overhead costs is extremely complex and depends on the industry that you’re in, but here are some good ways to get started.

Move key resources to the cloud

Cloud computing is a relatively recent development and has been adopted by many companies as an excellent way to save money and operate at peak efficiency. With cloud computing, you take advantage of an array of computers over a private or local network like the internet. You can use these computers just for data storage or to host and run your business software.

Cloud computing is inexpensive, secure and Eco-friendly. Taking advantage of cloud technology means that you won’t have to spend any money on your own network or multiple software licenses; and you don’t need to have space for your own data servers. This saves you on both your technology budget and your rent and storage. Cloud computing also enhances the efficiency of your business because it allows your sales staff to access files and data from anywhere in the world. This efficiency can easily translate directly into increased sales. In addition, new studies are showing that businesses using multi-tenant cloud data centers produce less carbon than businesses utilizing the same types of services in-house.

Process sales on the go

Mobile credit card processing is the wave of the future. Even the big box stores have started taking advantage of this technology, and for small business use it has many clear advantages. With mobile credit card processing technology you can take a payment from a credit or debit card anywhere you go. These types of services often have a small credit card reader you can attach to a tablet or smart phone in order to swipe customer’s cards and close the sale right away.

Ditch the office space

With all the mobile apps for businesses available today, a physical location isn’t even necessary for many business owners. If you find that your staff is mostly on the road, and that you can do your work from home, ditching the office space can be one of the most cost saving decisions you make. If you need a storefront office, you can always down-size and allow some of your employees to “work from anywhere”.

Hire independent contractors

Independent contractors are on an hourly basis and can’t claim the benefits most employees do. Of course, you need to follow the government’s guidelines on whether your staff qualifies as independent contractors, but many do. You may not be able to get them for as many hours, but the savings will pay off.

Ditch the land-lines

Phone systems are often one of the most expensive initial costs for a company, but this goes back to the olden days when phone systems were the core of a business. Consider switching to mobile phones if it’s at all possible, because this will not only save you a lot of money, but it will also enable your staff to be more accessible to clients. Land-line phone systems have expensive monthly costs and are chained to a desk, so if your sales staff moves around a lot, land-lines are virtually useless.

About the author

Zoe Maldonado is a freelance writer and blogger for TechBreach who enjoys writing about all things mobile and electronic and spending time with her very active twin boys.

Mar 15th, 2013 Attitude, Change, execution, Guest Post, Leadership, Sales Leadership, Sales Strategy, Sales Tip

Attitude, Change, execution, Guest Post, how to sell better, Planning, Sales Success, sell better

Dude, You’re Gonna Need More Than 15 Minutes3

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

Sales people are constantly working at communicating value to their buyers, especially in the early stages of the cycle, lead gen to prospecting and engaging the buyer to where they could complete an effective Discovery process. After sellers have done all the work involved in getting to the point where they can engage with a buyer, I am always surprised at how easily they are willing to undermine it, and risk their opportunity by saying something completely unnecessary, and serves only to sooth their nerves.

The expression that does this most is “I just need 15 minutes of your time” or “A quick 15 minutes”. Both are stupid and useless, the second is one I never did get, how is a “quick 15 minutes” different than 15 minutes, don’t all minutes have 60 seconds, it is just the quality of the content that seems to make some minutes last a lifetime.

I know why it is used, generally comes down to two things, both can be dealt with more intelligently and effectively. First is the popular notion that if you can get 15 minutes, and do well, they’ll give you an encore and you can stretch it out; I guess we all think we can do a good job. On the other hand I used to work for a VP of Sales who managed his calendar down to the minute, busy guy. He would ask you how long you needed, and would book you in for that time, if you said 15 minutes, he would end the meeting right at 15 minutes. He wasn’t rude, he had to get to his next scheduled meeting, if you couldn’t live up to the expectation I set, it was your issue, not his, you had to deal with it, not him.

Which brings us to the first contradiction, most decision makers have more than what to do in a day, how realistic is that they don’t have other meetings behind your, or other things that require their time and attention. Yes, no doubt we have all had instances where we were able to extend 15 minutes in to 45 or even 60 minutes, but an occasional anomaly does not make for a sound strategy.

The other issue with this approach is that you are in fact misleading the prospect before you have even met them. Think about it, do you really want to start things off by lying to the prospective buyer? Any way you rationalize it, that is exactly what you are doing, not a good foundation for a trust based relationship.

The second reason sales people do this is linked to the first, and just as weak. Specifically they are trying to minimize the apparent impact on the buyer, trying to make it “easy” on them, “Your time will not be wasted”, is the implication. But unless you are selling a coffee service or window cleaning, how much real or tangible value can you effectively communicate. More so, when you are selling what you would call a “solution”, where information has to be exchanged, 15 minutes is not going to get you there, you can pretend all you want, you are going to pitch, worse, you are going to ‘speed pitch’.

Some will tell me, “I can at least get things started”, sure then comeback and continue, with a bit of recapping, you are costing you and the buyer more time. By asking for 15 minutes you are undermining your so called “value proposition”. What the prospect hears is that this is so basic and unimportant, what they are asking themselves is as follows: “we’re going to make real progress in 15, can’t be that important or unique, maybe it can wait, or I can delegate it to someone who deals with unimportant things.”

Think about it, assuming things get started, small talk, while you assume they checked out your web site, you have to validate; if they did, you still need to create context, if they didn’t you have to do a bit more than that. From here, you need to at least go through the motions of gather information or executing a Discovery of facts and objective. Ah, look at that time is up! I remember someone trying to sell me an ad in local board of trade directory, they said they just need 15 minutes, I pointed out to him that he will need to ask me some questions, I will certainly have some for him, so let’s get real, how much time will we really need, he was honest enough to come across with a real time frame.

What’s worse, it is usually the seller who brings time in to the equation, not the prospect, again communicating a lack of confidence in their offering, or their ability to sell, or both. Just stop this juvenile practice, and sell.

Now I know that there times when you will be asked by a prospect how much time you need; in my case I gear my first meetings to about an hour, I am the one that gets antsy after 50 minutes. But rather than saying “one hour”, I pause, and ask, “how long can you give me?” They usually come back and say “is an hour enough?” Touch down!

But assuming they ask again, I just say “I usually need about 30 minutes for Discovery, I assume you’ll have some questions, so 40 minutes is safe.” If I feel they have a sense of humor, I add “any longer than that I take as interest on your part.”

I do have people who say “I can give you 30 minutes.” Great I can work with that; if they offer 15 minutes, I say no, I know what is going to happen, it is not a good use of my time, my most important resource. Either we can find a mutually better time, or on to the next one. If you have lots of prospects, this is not an issue, if you only have one or two, you may have to settle for the scraps that a quick 15 minutes represent.

What’s in Your Pipeline?
Tibor Shanto

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What's In Your Pipeline?

Conditions Are Not Objections (#video)0

Why Are You In Sales? – Sales eXchange 20020

Why Are You In Sales?

What if you could defeat the Status Quo0

Selling In The Right Time Frame – Sales eXchange 1962

What are you Listening To? (Part I)2

An Empty Wagon – Sales eXchange 1943

5 Tips For Cutting Overhead Costs and Unleashing Your Sales Team’s Potential0

Dude, You’re Gonna Need More Than 15 Minutes3