Get on the phone!
Last week we hosted a webinar along with our friends from Miller Heiman. The session focused on the findings of Miller Heiman’s annual best-practices survey. They’ve been doing the survey long enough that they have an excellent methodology worked up, which allows them to compare world-class sales organizations to the run of the mill.
As you might guess, the differences between the two groups are many, but one finding in particular jumped out at me. In response to the statement “We always review the results of our solution with strategic accounts,” world-class companies agreed at a 90 percent rate. And the non-world-class outfits? Try 42 percent.
Let me put that in another, even more horrifying, way:
58 percent of so-so sales organizations failed to review the results of what they sold with their strategic accounts.
This is one of the things that convinces me that good outfits have a great chance to weather the current economic storm: 58 percent of your competition is sleeping on the job. That’s what it means when 58 percent of your competition can’t figure out how to follow up with their most important customers.
Things that will keep you out of that woeful 58 percent:
- Calling up recent purchasers and asking “How are we doing?” or “How’s the service working out for you?” or “Are you happy?” or “Are you getting your money’s worth from us?”
- E-mailing a short survey.
- Stopping by to see a customer whose store or office is on your way — or out of your way.
- Calling up long-time customers and asking “How are you holding up in this market?” or “What more can we be doing for you?” or “You’ve been with us a long time, and I want you to know we don’t take you for granted. Are you getting what you need from us?”
- Scheduling a conference call or an in-person visit to go over all the parts of the working relationship between you and the folks representing your strategic accounts.
- Calling up your customers alphabetically, or by date of contract, or by height, and saying “How are you doing?” and “How can we help?” Yes, I realize I’m repeating myself, but apparently this topic requires remedial lessons.
Use the phone, e-mail, telegram, smoke signals, anything . . . but get in touch with your customers, and especially your strategically important ones. Persist in this until you start hearing the bad news that’s been hiding.
In these market conditions, “Oh, fine” is not a great answer to “How’s the product helping you?” But silence from the customer in response to unasked questions from the sales force — that’s even worse.
Get on the phone.
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Photo by macinate, used under a Creative Commons license.
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5 Comments so far
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Tim:
It always astounds me when businesses don’t do something as basic as asking for feedback. It’s even more astounding in the current economy. Assuming that what worked for your customers six months or a year ago is still working for them today is a huge risk. And an unnecessary one.
Thanks for sharing.
Mark
Thanks for the nice comment, Mark. I particularly like what you say about “unnecessary” risk. Because of the ways the economy has changed in the past year, some companies find themselves facing unavoidable challenges — lower total demand, harder for their customers to get bank credit, et cetera. But this one is *totally* avoidable.
One more thing: if you call up your customers now, you might be chagrined to find out that they can now justify only half of what you sell them. But when it comes time to purchase again, renew service subscriptions, or the like, would it be better to keep a happy customer who’s using that half . . . or lose a customer who will now do *no* business with you?
Tim – a stunning figure ain’t it ? And so simple to “fix” one can only be re-stunned at the lacks. There are three major functions that touch the market- and customer-space: Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. Each in their own way is a bi-directional channel if properly managed. Each is largely broken in the way you and M-H describe. Here are some acid tests to judge both functional effectiveness and overall enterprise health:
1) Marketing – are they telling authentic stories appropriate for the times ?
2) Sales – are they following a disciplined process that maintains the customer relationship ?
3) CustSrvc – is it chartered to serve the customer’s interests or the firm’s ? A cost to control or a way of making your value higher ?
All of which are readily observable and so become judgment sticks to measure enterprise performance with. Companies that are failing are not good bets as survivors, investments or partners IMHO.
Addendum:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/04/this-is-broken.html
If you haven’t seen this 20 min talk by Seth on “this is broken”, otherwise known as the what are they thinking pitch, it fits perfectly with your theme.
Thanks for pointing me to the Godin video, Dave, which I had seen a while back, but which bears repeated viewing.
It’s amazing how many obvious problems — and often their obvious solutions, too — reveal themselves as soon as we start taking responsibility for noticing and acting on them.