That’s right.
Serving, not selling. I know you are concerned with sales. It’s easy to determine how well your people are selling to your customers. That’s what sales reports are for. But your customers are more concerned with how well they are being served by your salespeople.
Why is that
important? Because you are in it for the long run. You don’t want to just sell something to a customer, you want to build a relationship that lasts over time and results in years of sales. In one sense, your business is not really a sales business, it’s a relationship-building business.
And when it comes to
developing long-lasting profitable relationships, it is not how well your salespeople present features and benefits and overcome objections that counts, it is how well they serve the customers’ needs.
This brings
us to a couple of questions. First, what does it mean for a salesperson to serve the customer? And second, how do you know that it is happening effectively?
Salespeople serving the customer?
Clearly, you know what it means for your company to serve your customer. On-time
deliveries, competitive prices, reliable service, competent CSRs, etc. But, what do your customers want from your outside salespeople? Ask each salesperson what it means to serve the customer, and you can expect to hear a variety of answers. Some define service as picking up purchase orders, others will define it as taking inventory, some will propose that following up on back orders or short shipments is part of it, while others will say that it involves visiting the customer on a
predictable basis. That’s the problem. Few companies have any consistent description of what it really means to serve the customer. Generally, salespeople are left to figure it out on their own, create their own definitions, and develop their own standards.
I have yet to meet a salesperson who did not
believe that he/she provided excellent service to their customers. Every salesperson perceives that they are doing a good job. Not once has a salesperson taken me off to the side at a break in a seminar I was teaching, and confide in me, “You know, Dave, I really do a poor job of serving my customers.”
So, on one
hand, we have vague and general definitions of what it means to provide good service to the customer, and on the other, we have the often inaccurate perceptions of the salespeople.
The result? Inconsistent service, and lots of unmet expectations on the part of the customers.
I recently worked with one of my clients to gain a deeper understanding of what service means by, of all things, asking the customers! We gathered six of this client’s brightest and most insightful customers together for a half-day focus group. I facilitated the videotaped discussion, and the client viewed the tape later. What did we
discover?
How customers define good service.
Here’s how those customers defined “good service” from the outside sales force.
