Guaranteed!!!!!!
This formula shows how people calculate their satisfaction with what you’ve done for them.
Satisfaction = Reality – Expectation
Obvious, I know, but all too often forgotten. So here are two ways to lift your clients satisfaction levels .
Option 1 is by far the best but if you’re a bit short of time I’d probably go for option 2.
Hope this helps.
That way you fools!
Just supposing you wanted to get everybody in your organisation behind the growth of your business.
You know the sort of thing: everybody promoting the same message; looking for suitable new clients and engaging anybody who has shown even a modicum of interest in what you do.
Well you could hire a consultant to help you or maybe even attend a course or two but supposing you didn’t have the time or the money to do this. Well there’s a very cheap (free) and simple alternative that’ll do you proud and all you need to do is answer 5 questions. Here they are: –
Let’s have a look at my answers to these questions then: –
Duh duuurrr!
Your first drafts will probably have too many words in them; aim for about 60 words or less because when it comes to this kind of message less is very definitely more.
If you struggle to do this my advice is to give it to somebody else and tell them they HAVE to make it less than 60 words – you may be quite surprised at what they come up with!
All you need to do now is make sure that everybody in your organisation can answer these 5 questions. Take your time but be very persistent until everybody from the receptionist to the CEO can answer them in the same way.
You can turn this into an “elevator speech” just add the following words before each answer: –
It may not make a sale for you but it’s likely to start a conversation that just might.
Let’s see what damage you can do now. Give it a go and feel free to publish as comments on this blog post and I’ll happily critique them for you.
So you’d like to become a trusted advisor to your clients eh? Who wouldn’t but could you do this?
When I first went into sales it was with a Midlands based IT recruitment company. I knew nothing about sales and even less about what it took to create a really strong relationship with my clients – in short I had no notion of how to become a trusted advisor.
Well, the first big lesson I learned, and one I’ve never forgotten, happened a couple of months into my new job. Let me share the story with you and then the incredibly powerful message I think you can take from it.
Our great rival in those days ran a small, what today would be called boutique, recruitment firm working in much the same geographical area and market sectors as we did. We’ll call him Alan.
Alan was a man of his word, entirely dedicated to quality and somebody who oozed traditional values; you know, your average competitor nightmare. As soon as Alan started to trade with a client we found it difficult to get any more work out of them and, equally bad, the best freelancers signed exclusively with him which meant we couldn’t use them. All in all Alan was bad news as far as we were concerned.
Then one day it looked like it was all going to change for us. One of Alan’s clients was referred to us as being “a really good agency” and phoned in with a tricky requirement he was finding it hard to satisfy. This was fantastic news: at last Alan was failing to deliver which we could use to our benefit with his other clients “Alan couldn’t deliver so we were called in” and his pool of freelancers “Alan doesn’t have sole control of these clients; we’ve just put somebody in at so-and-so”. Perfect!
The requirement was for an obscure technical skill and only for a very short period of time; 6 weeks I think, but we buried it. Mike, my boss at the time, had me drop all my other more lucrative requirements and work solely on this. After a few days I’d found two great candidates. Mike took the CVs over personally and arranged interviews there and then. The client liked both and offered one on the spot.
Mike went over in person to see the client to get the paperwork all signed up. When he came back his face didn’t convey the triumphant glory that I thought it should have done. In fact he was a regular “Black Ralph”. I assumed there’d been a problem but there hadn’t’ – freelancer signed up and client happy. It was something else, something altogether more crushing.
Apparently when the contracts had been signed Mike mentioned that we always appreciate a referral and asked who had made it so that he could thank them in person “Oh sure” replied the client “it was Alan”.
How could this be? Who would refer a prized client to their major competitor? It turned out Alan did and he did it for a simple and yet very powerful reason: because it was the best option for his client.
Alan felt he couldn’t have provided the best candidates for his client because his candidate database was weak in this obscure technical skill so he did was was obvious to him: he referred his client to the people who he felt could do a better job – us!
So, you want to be a trusted advisor eh? Easy: always, that is 100% of the time, do what’s best for your clients even if that means you lose out in the short term. This is how you become a trusted advisor and it’s almost impossible to compete against: you say “no” when you’re not the best option.
Did we get any more business from our delighted new client? Nah, not a dicky-bird. Did Alan? I’ll leave you to make an educated guess on that one.
Do we need a national Red Cap day?
A while back I was sitting on a flight from London to Singapore when I struck up a conversation with the chap sitting next to me.
He was a freelance accountant working for an Indonesian company but based in England. After the usual small talk the conversation drifted around to business travel (in his job he had to do rather a lot of it).
He said that years ago any travel whether by car, rail or plane was his thinking time or, if he was with a colleague, the time they talked strategy not tactics. He went on to say that with mobile devices and 4G his only refuge now was long-haul flights.
We both agreed that the accepted belief that “you must be available 24/”‘ held by most businesses these days just results in everybody living in a tactical world with little time left over for innovative or creative thinking.
He then told me of an accounts department he’d worked for once who were big on open-plan and so low on the opportunity for strategic thought. The deal was if you didn’t want to be interrupted you wore a red baseball cap. Nobody, not even the MD apparently, would talk to somebody who was sporting their chapeau rouge.
They recognised that everybody, especially leaders, needs some uninterrupted time when they can focus their thoughts.
Think about that for a moment. A busy office environment; a real need to focus and concentrate and a sign that says “leave me alone”. How cool would that be! So perhaps we all need a physical version of a red hat (or maybe even just a red hat) to enable us to fence off some personal thinking time that everybody respects, even the boss.
Or perhaps we could all just take more long-haul flights.
By Christmas 1997 I was the MD of a multi-million pound IT services business and bored to tears. My partner and I had our usual festive lunch and based upon this fact and our firm belief that “if you lose passion for your business sooner or later you’ll lose your business” we decided the time had come to sell up.
The last remnant of the once mighty Software Knowledge – a coaster.
We had connections with two of the big four consultancies: one through a “fastest growing private company” thing we used to feature in and one through a mutual friend and so we approached both.
After the initial meeting they both asked for very similar information with which to do their research and produce their pitch. So far so good and all very exciting. Then the day came for them to present to us – we arranged for both presentations to be on the same day.
The first team did a great job of presenting their approach and what they felt they could get for us and if I’d needed to make a decision there and then I would have gone with them. What you’d expect from one of the “Big 4” I guess.
After lunch we sat in the second presentation which was remarkably similar to the first. In fact if you hadn’t known it was impossible you could’ve been forgiven for assuming that both teams had written their presentations together in the same room they were so identical. But we had to make a decision.
In the end we went with Mark Asplin and his team at KPMG, for 3 reasons: –
The reason I’ve written this blog is simple. In today’s corporate world of tenders, supplier lists and purchasing departments its sometimes easy to forget that given the choice people will always buy from those that they like, trust and feel valued by.
Mark’s fee was £500k; he earned every penny and he won the deal because he demonstrated his abilities (Big 4 – never in question really), his understanding of us as people and we liked him and his team.
Never underestimate the power of personality.
Lies, damned lies and statistics.
People like numbers. Read a piece of text and our eyes are naturally drawn to any numbers it contains: percentages, ratios, fractions, money and even plain old numbers just draw us in.
The problem is that some people use this to their advantage by measuring things that have no real effect upon the end-goal. Check these out: –
None of these numbers have a direct connection with how much revenue a business makes. People like to think they do but it’s mostly anecdotal evidence and therefore so much hocum-pokum.
So here is the definition of a real performance metric. Anything that you can relate directly to your end objective – in most cases revenue or bottom line profit.
Now, I’m not saying don’t collect numbers and statistics (I love to see how many followers I have on this blog – “oh vanity thy name is Michael”) but what I am saying is either treat them as a bit of fun and attach nothing important to them (budgets, pay rises etc.) or gather additional data that will allow them to become meaningful performance metrics.
So for example recording the number of new prospects added to your pipeline each month really doesn’t tell you anything useful (they might all be poor candidates). But if you also happen to know the average conversion rate of prospects into clients this figure takes on a completely different importance. If you also happen to have an average revenue per client figure you can estimate the effect on your revenue an increase in prospects is likely to lead to. Now that’s a performance metric I can get behind!
Measurement by proxy is often championed by those who can’t prove their worth but feel the need to do so. They’re pointless, misleading and sometimes delusional statistics. My advice? If you see them simply ask “and so how does this affect the bottom line?” and see what happens.
Recently my daughter and her friends had a weekend break in Amsterdam to celebrate the birthday of one of the group. They stayed at a small hotel off the beaten track which had been booked at random from the internet and as a result weren’t expecting anything out of the ordinary.
When they checked in the receptionist looked at each of their passports, making notes as he did so. Later that day the birthday girl returned to her room to find a small cake, a bottle of Cava, four glasses and a note wishing her a happy 24th birthday.
This is what’s known as a Sili feature; Small Item, Large Impact. In this case it must have cost a handful of Euros and a few minutes of their time but the effect was enormous. In a world where there is so much choice we’re always looking for a reason to select one option over another and people raving about something (no matter how small) will usually tip the balance.
The upshot of all of this is the girl’s sister has already booked in for a long weekend at the same hotel and we’ll give the place a try later in the year when we visit the city for an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum.
Here are some other Sili feature ideas :-
– a small hotel we stayed in where everybody from the barman to the chambermaid called us by our names.
– a beachside restaurant that always serves a complementary single-glass bottle of Cava at the end of a meal.
– when a client re-visits your offices the receptionist asks if they would like the drink they chose on their previous visit.
– a client receives a hand-written note from a supplier on the anniversary of their first deal thanking them for being a client.
There are no end to these ideas and they all have a 3 things in common: they’re cheap to provide, take little time to do but make the recipient feel special and valued.
Ask yourself this: what can I do that will cost next to nothing to provide but will completely take my clients by surprise in such a way that they will want to tell other people about it. The answer will be your very own Sili feature.
photo credit: Dinner Series via photopin cc
Not sure I’d sleep easy knowing this.
Recently Avana Bakeries, a cake factory based in Newport Wales, announced that 650 jobs were under threat of redundancy. A well run and profitable company only a short time ago and now this. How could it possibly have happened?
Simple really, 85% of their turnover was from one client. The client decided to buy elsewhere.
This is what we can learn from Avana’s fate: a good profit is not always a good profit.
Too much revenue from too few clients is easy to manage and so more profitable but it’s also highly dangerous; a bit like living on the slopes of a sleeping volcano: sooner later it’s going to blow and when it does it’s going to feel mighty unpleasant.
You might argue that like Avana you have no choice; the revenue is there so you take it and I’d agree but I’d also stress that your sales function should be utterly focused on winning business elsewhere. If they are unable to do this you must either change the way they sell or change them.
Active analysis and management of your revenue/client spread is a vital element of businesses these days. You decide the mix of small, medium and large clients you want and then set your sales team to achieve it.
It takes time. It takes focus. It takes a sales team able to achieve it but in today’s fickle world active client portfolio management is vital.
Be in control of how your business grows!
5 Ways to leave a trail of happy clients
I like my business development to be like my food: simple but tasty. Let’s see if this little lot tickles your BD taste buds like it does mine.
1. Always do what’s best for the client.
Short term gain, long term loss or short term loss and long term gain? Your call of course but personally I always aim for the latter.
If you’re in sales and people have a need it’s not too hard to get them to take your option and if that’s the right thing for them to do well fine but if it isn’t say so and move on.
Only a few days ago I was speaking to somebody who I wanted to come on my Business Growth Programme but when she outlined what else she was doing in her business it was obvious to me that taking on the overhaul and upgrade of her BD capability would have been too much and I told her so. Lost the deal but hopefully gained another layer of trust.
2. Be great at what you do.
An obvious thing to say but not one that always translates easily into reality. Too many of us settle for “getting by” especially when we have all sorts of time/money/people/project pressures dragging us down. Occasionally all of us (definitely me included) succumb to this and do second best work.
A tick-box “that’s done let’s move on to the next” mentality does not create delighted clients. The question to ask is “If I were the client would I be thrilled with what I just did for me?” – if the answer is no you know what to do next.
3. Always make your clients feel good.
Never belittle them, bamboozle them with jargon, say you’ll do something and then don’t, make them feel out of control, overload them with things you can do instead and finally never under any circumstances go back on a verbal promise you made.
I can almost imagine you reading this and shaking your heads in disgust at the very thought that you would do those things. The truth is we all do them from time to time it’s just that we’re usually too busy to notice.
A study in America found that most referrals were given by people who had enjoyed the experience of dealing with the supplier; the quality of the outcome was important but of secondary value!
4. Keep them informed at all times even when it’s bad news.
I was trained in the recruitment industry of the late 80s which was a different world to the one we live in today but one thing that has remained the same is that people do not like to be the bearer of bad news. An understandable but flawed belief.
Whether you have good news or bad news people like to know what’s happening and if you don’t tell them they’ll fill the void themselves and probably not in a good way. Much better to drop the odd email over to reassure your clients things are still on track or make that phone call/visit if things are not. The sooner you do this; take the heat and then come up with a plan the better.
Avoid the blame game altogether: if a problem arises quantify it; think of some options; engage the client; agree a way forward and then deal with it. Blame and excuses can wait (forever if I had my way).
5. Check they’re still OK when the dust has settled.
This is a really simple thing to do. Between 6 and 8 weeks after you have completed the work/transaction re-establish contact to see if everything is as it should be.
If the deal was a big one give them a call; smaller deals would warrant a letter (signed in ink by you) and smaller deals should be dealt with through email or social media. The outcome is the same: the client feels you care about them and hey, if there are any issues you can dive in and sort them out winning you even more client brownie points.
So there you have it. 5 ways to create a trail of happy clients none of which need special training or are expensive to do and yet the result……. well, why don’t you try them and find out.
My new oil painting – beautiful!
I recently bought a painting from an art dealer in Birmingham. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to have it and my wife was even keener than I was. Not really a great place to start our negotiations.
Anyhow, we engaged the sales person in conversation and she did everything right. I did what I was trained to do and got to a certain stage of negotiations (established basic grounds for the deal) and then announced we were going to clear off and think about it and could they have their “best price” ready in case we came back.
So 45 minutes later and with a glass of Australian Chardonnay sloshing around inside me (they didn’t train me to do that in sales school) we headed back. Bless her – she had moved the picture into a separate room and set everything up for a private viewing – damn I hate to be a foregone conclusion!
We arrived back to see a 7% price reduction, a good start but we could do better, we proceeded to present a split front: Mrs Ames was keen with me less so (lies lies lies – I wanted it more than she did) and we had researched the painter on the internet only to find his works were going in America for less.
“How much less?” she asked – first chink in the negotiation armour methinks. I was honest and told her which represented a 15% reduction from the original price. She frowned, said she would have to check with a director and left the room. A little too soon she came back and said it was my lucky day and she could do the deal. Result! Or was it.
I’m now left thinking I could have got another percent or two off the deal and maybe she’s feeling she should have come back with a counter offer so neither of us are entirely satisfied.
What she should have done was come back with a long face and suggest that despite her best efforts that price could not be allowed. However she could knock off 12%; would that do? Fantastic! I accept; sign the check and everybody goes home happy.
Negotiation is a very important aspect client customer care – without it nobody knows if they have really got the best deal.
The important thing is that everybody feels they could not have done any better in the deal. So keep slogging on until you reach a stone-faced “no” and then decide if the deal on the table works for you. Done!
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