Grow Customer’s Results
When you grow your customer’s results:
- they move from satisfied to loyal
- your customers refer you to new clients
- your customers grow and thus increase their volume with you
- your risk is reduced in terms of losing business
- your expenses are reduced in terms of cost of sales and customer support
Your Customer’s success depends on your success. Twenty-first century customers want suppliers/vendors who are strategic in nature. They are looking for relationships that have a long term potential. They are looking for you to be a positive impact to their organization. Read the book Achieve Sales Excellence by Howard Stevens, CEO of the Chally Group, and you will find that the 7 Rules of the Customer are all about your sales team and your overall company helping them achieve their goals.
What I found so many times is that a sales organization is setup to make more money, not to help their customers make more money! I see sales forecasts from the seller’s perspective, not the customer’s. Customer Service departments are set up in a way to keep expenses lower, not to better serve their customers. Marketing is driven from operations, i.e. “What we want to sell”, not from the customer’s needs or goals.
Until you see your organization from your customer’s perspective, you are operating from only 50% of the equation, you have a blind side.
To improve your customer’s results you need:
- a sales team that is knowledgeable and can speak to business issues in the language of the decision maker.
- sales team that knows how to identify buying criteria.
- a sales team that has great relationships within your organization as well as the clients (I call this being double stuff – see my blog).
- a sales team that adds value at every step of the process and thus builds trust.
- sales operations that are customer centric such as intelligent CRM that actually helps sales reps improve their effectiveness in serving the customer, not just keeping tract of customer data for your needs.
- a compensation plan that promotes the right activities.
- effective leadership at all levels of the company.
- effective communication and decision making.
- every team member working toward the company’s mission and goals.
A company that is constantly working to improve will be effective in serving their customers bringing innovation to the market place and thus improve profits and reduce risk with loyal customers and employees.