Mark Jewell's Blog: Selling Energy, page 232
September 18, 2017
Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty, and Maximize Profits
Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining a new one. Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. – Bain & Company
These statistics emphasize the importance of customer service in retaining existing customers. While it’s essential to always strive to bring in new customers, providing excellent customer service to existing customers after the sale is not even optional. It’s a must-do.
If your company doesn’t already have a comprehensive customer service plan (or if you want to improve your existing plan), I highly recommend reading Strategic Customer Service: Managing the Customer Experience to Increase Positive Word of Mouth, Build Loyalty, and Maximize Profits, by John A. Goodman. This book provides some great tips on how to deliver high-quality customer service, leverage the power of referrals, and build customer loyalty.
Here’s a summary from Amazon Books:
“The success of any organization depends on high-quality customer service. But for companies that strategically align customer service with their overall corporate strategy, it can transcend typical good business to become a profitable word-of-mouth machine that will transform the bottom line. The author draws on over thirty years of research for companies such as 3M, American Express, Chik-Fil-A, USAA, Coca-Cola, FedEx, GE, Cisco Systems, Neiman Marcus, and Toyota. Filled with proven strategies and eye-opening case studies, this book challenges many aspects of conventional wisdom using hard data and reveals how any organization can earn more loyalty, win more customers… and improve their financial bottom line.”
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September 17, 2017
Weekly Recap, September 17, 2017
Tuesday: Uncover buying motives of your prospects by asking previous customers if there are any other benefits they’ve experienced in the wake of doing business with you.
Wednesday: Explore forming partnerships with non-competitive vendors or service providers for whom you can create new business.
Thursday: Learn how to to migrate the discussion away from your prospect’s concern or objection and toward something that is more positive and productive.
Friday: Discover how to make an immediate personal connection with your audience when you walk into a room to give a presentation.
Saturday: Check out this article in FastCompany for four science-backed reasons why you do your best work in the morning.
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September 16, 2017
Why You Do Your Best in the Morning
It’s 6:30AM and the alarm clock rings. Many of us “early birds” jump out of bed with a smile on our faces, ready to tackle the day. A “night owl,” however, probably has a different reaction to the 6:30AM alarm ringing – one that involves multiple uses of the “snooze” button and the question “Why do I have to get up so early!?”
If you consider yourself a “night owl,” I highly recommend reading this article by FastCompany. It has some great science-backed reasons why being a morning person can be advantageous to your productivity.
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September 15, 2017
Know Your Audience
When you walk into a room to give a presentation, one of the best ways to break down the barrier between you and your audience is to form an immediate personal connection. We always talk about building rapport in the context of one-on-one interactions; however, the same principle applies in a group setting where it’s very important to establish good rapport with your whole audience – after all, you want each and every one of them on your side when they compare notes with each other later to make a decision.
So how do you make an immediate personal connection? It’s good practice to make eye contact with each person in your audience. You shouldn’t stare at anyone (of course), but you should scan the room and make eye contact while you speak.
Ideally, you will know at least one person by name, whether it’s the person who walked you into the room or someone you know from a previous engagement. If you do, address that person by name in front of the audience: “Hey, Tom, how are you doing? Thanks again for the help last week walking through 123 Main Street.” What does that do immediately? It shows that you’re friendly and that you have a personal relationship with someone in the audience. In turn, the rest of the audience will subconsciously feel more comfortable with you knowing that you’re buddy-buddy with one of their friends.
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September 14, 2017
Migrating the Discussion
When you’re selling an efficiency product or service, it’s pretty much a given that your prospect will raise some concern or objection during the negotiation. It’s your job as a sales professional to migrate the discussion away from that concern or objection and toward something that is more positive and productive. One of the tactics I teach in all of my efficiency-focused sales trainings is how to use certain words and phrases that move the prospect’s focus from whatever the roadblock might be to a new perspective that will help frame the value proposition under consideration in a more favorable light.
Suppose you have a prospect that is concerned about the payback of an expense-reducing capital project. A typical salesperson would reply (somewhat defensively), “Well, the payback period is 4.5 years, but…” A sales professional, on the other hand, would reply unapologetically, “The payback is 4.5 years… and I think what you’ll find more interesting is that this project sports a savings-to-investment ratio of 6.2, which means that for every dollar you invest, the project is estimated to return six dollars and twenty cents over its lifetime in present value dollars.” (Always follow this type of statement with silence to let the facts sink in). If the prospect looks confused, repeat the explanation, emphasizing that earning $6.20 in present value for every dollar invested represents a fantastic return. You might even add, “If I showed you a magical ATM machine that returned $6.20 for every dollar that you put in, how many dollars would you put in?”
Now, notice I said “and” and not “but.” “But” is not a helpful word. It sounds defensive. Moreover, the “but” negates everything in front of it. If you can’t make “and” work in place of “but,” try using “however.” Remember, the specific words you choose can have a significant impact on the emotion you elicit from your listener. “However” can be used in place of “but”; however, it has a less negative connotation.
Notice also that I said, “I think what you’ll find more interesting is…” This is a great phrase to use for several reasons: it acknowledges the prospect’s current point of view without validating it; it migrates the conversation away from the negative and toward the positive; and, it underscores that what you’re about to say is something that a reasonable investor should consider to be “more interesting.”
The prospect should find savings-to-investment ratio to be more interesting than simple payback period. After all, which is more important: How fast they’re going to get their money back, or how many total dollars of present value they can look forward to earning over the entire analysis term juxtaposed to how much they had to invest in the first place?
I use this example frequently when discussing financial analysis because prospects are often focused on the wrong metrics, and the above-referenced tactic is a great way to migrate the discussion to proper metrics. Realize that this tactic can be used to overcome virtually any roadblock, financial or otherwise. It allows you to redirect a prospect’s focus and put the discussion back on the road to “yes.”
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September 13, 2017
Benefits of Forming Partnerships
One of the best ways to grow an efficiency business is to partner with non-competitive vendors or service providers. There’s a trick to doing so, though. Most “salespeople” look for a non-competitive vendor who could send them leads. Sales professionals, on the other hand, find non-competitive vendors for whom they can create new business. Why? Because it’s not enough to assure a potential vendor partner that you’re not going to reduce their current business volume if they were to send you leads. Why should they take the time to play ball with you? However, if you prove that you could be a fertile source of new leads for their business, you’ll capture their attention, and they’ll likely use whatever mechanisms you put in place to facilitate sharing of leads.
There are a multitude of benefits to forming partnerships. You can use them to provide your existing customers with new offerings (and in some situations, prevent them from searching for new vendors with more complete offerings). Provided the lead swapping becomes genuinely bilateral, you’ll also wind up with new prospects to approach with your own offerings… and you’ll be approaching those new opportunities from a position of strength because you’ve been referred by someone the prospect already trusts.
One word of caution when forming partnerships: protect your reputation. If people in either your company or your partner’s company fail to deliver what they promise, both of your reputations are at risk. Moreover, realize that if the partners who recommend you have a bad reputation to begin with, you will be tarred with the same brush. Be sure you can deliver what you promise and that they can deliver what they promise. Otherwise your prospects will think of you as being partnered with the village idiot (or worse), and your outbound marketing campaign will be compromised rather than enhanced.
Think about products and services that might benefit your customers that you don’t currently offer and research some reputable companies in your area that have a great reputation for specifying and delivering those offerings. And when you finally decide to propose a partnership, be sure to present a carefully considered and compelling case as to why joining forces would be a win-win for both of your organizations.
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September 12, 2017
Uncover Your Buyer’s Motive
Knowing the buying motives of your prospects is both vital to successful selling and harder than it may seem. So how do you really uncover their motives? You may have a list of dozens of questions that you ask your prospects in an attempt to learn more about what they really want. Questions are great, and they have the potential to resolve at least some of the mystery. That said the best targets for your questions are your previous customers.
There’s an interesting story I heard many, many years ago about a Japanese electronics manufacturer who was planning to bring boom boxes to this country. They were evaluating whether they should manufacture yellow ones or black ones; they didn’t want to risk the capital to manufacture both colors without knowing which one would be a bigger hit with their target audience. As you might expect, a focus group was convened with a bunch of kids who represented the target demographic to buy these machines. After showing both models, talking about the options, and then circulating a survey to complete, it appeared that the kids unanimously preferred yellow… well, at least according to the surveys.
Fortunately, this was not this particular focus group facilitator’s first rodeo. At the end of the focus group session – after the surveys had been collected – he offered the following closing: “Okay, great! Thanks for joining us today and sharing your feedback with us. We’ve written it all down. Anyway, we’re flying back to Tokyo tonight, and we’re obviously not going to take these extra boom boxes back with us. In fact, we’re not taking any of the food back either, so fill up your pockets with the extra sandwiches and drinks and give them to your friends… and while you’re at it, feel free to take whatever boom boxes you want. Whatever you don’t take, we’re going to donate because it’s not worth the cost to ship this gear back to Japan.”
He then sat back and watched as every single person in the focus group picked up a black boom box and walked out of the room. Every single yellow one remained on the table.
What does this story prove? An old salt in sales once told me, “Buyers are liars, and sellers are storytellers.” And the funny thing is, many buyers don’t even know they’re lying when they tell you what their motives are. Sometimes potential buyers think that they feel a certain way – or perhaps they think that they should have a certain preference – yet when it comes down to actually writing a check for what they said they’d buy from you, it’s a totally different story.
So, what to do? As mentioned above, ask previous customers – people who have actually written you a check – “Why did you do business with my company? What did you most admire about our product or service? Did we deliver all of the things that we promised during the sales process?” And then ask the golden question, “Are there any other benefits that you experienced in the wake of doing business with us that we did not mention when you were making the decision to do business with us?”
Questions like these get to the heart of why your past customers actually decided to buy from you. Moreover, they’ll inform the way in which you approach future sales opportunities with both your present customers and new prospects.
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September 11, 2017
An Innovator’s Guide to Creativity
Sometimes you can find great advice in the most unlikely places. This week I’d like to highlight a book that doesn’t necessarily come from a business or energy efficiency standpoint, but a design standpoint. Nevertheless, it has some excellent ideas you can apply to your career and home life.
Marty Neumeier is a veteran of creative thinking and design, having worked for major companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Adobe. He is currently the Director of Transformation for Liquid Agency and has written about his use of “design thinking” throughout his career, namely putting your customers first and challenging the status quo – not all that different from what we’re trying to do with sales, right?
In The 46 Rules of Genius he offers a variety of different tactics that can be used for problem solving, beginning with his first rule: “Break the rules.” Its layout is simple and expertly laid out, posing questions regarding the challenges of problem-solving, setting goals and making strides that matter.
Here is the summary from Amazon:
“There’s no such thing as an accidental genius. Anyone who’s reached that exalted state has arrived there by design. But simply wanting to get there is not enough. A would-be genius also needs a theoretical framework, a basic compass, a set of principles to guide the way forward.
“Marty Neumeier, acclaimed author of The Brand Gap and Metaskills, has compressed the wisdom of the ages into the first “quick start guide” for genius—46 glittering gems that will light your path to creative brilliance. This is THE essential handbook for designers, entrepreneurs, marketers, educators, artists, scientists, innovators, and future leaders in every field.”
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September 10, 2017
Weekly Recap, September 10, 2017
Tuesday: Check out a few stories, courtesy of some colleagues of mine, about the power of the connecting the dots between your product or service and your prospect’s bottom line.
Wednesday: If you are looking for an inspiration on why we do the work that we do, watch this TED Talk.
Thursday: Explore the shortcomings of the simple payback period.
Friday: Discover the do’s and do not’s for presenting to the C-Suite.
Saturday: Check out this article in Success magazine online for “4 Tips to Set Yourself up for a Better Tomorrow Today.”
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Weekly Recap, September 3, 2017
Tuesday: Check out a few stories, courtesy of some colleagues of mine, about the power of the connecting the dots between your product or service and your prospect’s bottom line.
Wednesday: If you are looking for an inspiration on why we do the work that we do, watch this TED Talk.
Thursday: Explore the shortcomings of the simple payback period.
Friday: Discover the do’s and do not’s for presenting to the C-Suite.
Saturday: Check out this article in Success magazine online for “4 Tips to Set Yourself up for a Better Tomorrow Today.”
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