Dec 8, 2010 | Customers, Management, Sales
It is usually easier to find more business with existing customers that it is to find new ones, or to devote the resources to reducing customer churn. Nevertheless, most enterprises overspend their limited resources seeking new customers at the expense of their existing customers.
If you must chase new customers, there are 3 very simple questions to ask:
1. Do they have a problem you can solve?
2. Do they have the money and desire to take a risk with a new supplier?
3. Can you reach and communicate effectively with them?.
Three ticks, and you have some chance, two ticks and your time is better spent elsewhere, no ticks, wake up to yourself.
Nov 2, 2010 | Customers, Sales
A frustrating “customer service” experience recently reminded me of this lovely parody of customer service meets lean principals. If it wasn’t so true, it would be funny.
Getting customers is hard, and getting harder, so when one comes to your door it is for a reason, and the last thing you should be doing is making it hard to open.
Oct 31, 2010 | Customers, Sales
Sales is something we all do, all the time, professionally as well as in our private lives. We may not always be selling a product for an employer, but we will be selling our ideas, priorities, time, and experience, in some way. Here are some simple rules:
- Talk as little as possible, and listen as much as possible
- Recognise early, preferably before anyone else, when the horse is dead and get off
- Act short term to make the sale, but never at the expense of the medium and long term, as any individual sale is rarely the end of the relationship, unless you choose it to be.
- Lack of real understanding of the problems faced by customers, their external competitive and profitability challenges, and the internal organisational and operational barriers getting in the way of “yes”.
- Lack of product knowledge appropriate to the interaction of the person you are talking to.
Fix these, and the sale should be pretty easy.
Oct 7, 2010 | Customers, Management, OE, Sales, Strategy
Since man sought to organise themselves beyond family groups, geography has been the fundamental organising principal of almost all the institutions created, it was really the only thing that made sense. Everything from businesses to empires and the church(s) were geographically organised structures.
Since the 70’s, many commercial institutions have attempted to reorganise along a customer or product driven logic, largely with limited success. Geography and the transaction costs associated with removing the natural barrier of distance have conspired to make it difficult and costly, and the old management silos are hard to break down until the enterprise is in real trouble, as IBM was in the 80’s.
For the last 10 years at a huge rate the net has removed geography as a significant driver of organisational structures. It simply makes no sense to now have multiple overheads in neighboring geographies, when the net tools enable the sharing of everything immediate.
The outcome, structure your organisation to focus on what keeps it alive, customers!
Oct 5, 2010 | Change, Communication, Leadership, Sales
Trying to get stakeholder buy-in for an idea that breaks the mould is very hard in most organisations as it challenges the dominating logic of the organisation, what has succeeded in the past, and made it what it is today.
This process can be helped by breaking the internal selling process into two parts:
- Gain understanding of the idea from a “technical” perspective, the what and why, to ensure the facts are clear, understood, and acknowledged.
- Then, seek to address the cognitive issues, the “do you agree with it” things, but having gained an agreement of the technical aspects, the “do you understand it” issues, it is much harder for someone to disagree when all is left is the emotive stuff.
Sep 19, 2010 | Customers, Marketing, Sales
Watching The Gruen Transfer a couple of weeks ago, one of the panelists quoted one of the oldest adages in marketing, ‘Sell the problem” as if it was a revelation. Fact is, addressing the problem is often forgotten as marketers become so entranced by the features of their products they forget to define the reason somebody would buy it.
People do not buy solutions to problems until they see the solution as costing less than managing the ongoing costs and inconvenience the problem generates, it therefore follows that the best way to sell is to develop the understanding of the relative size of the problem to which you have the solution.
This is the basis of “SPIN” selling, (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need pay-off) which is still the best sales book ever written, outlining a selling process that focuses on what a sale delivers to the buyer, and the best way to get there.
