THE BIG QUESTION

Here's something to ask yourself...

Where do my customers have to go to succeed in the marketplace, and how can I be a partner in helping them get there??

Reawaken Dead Accounts

For many years, one of Mike’s best customers was a large bank.
He loved them and thought they loved him, too.

Then, sales began to slip. The bank didn’t call quite as often as they once had. Mike still got orders, but they weren’t as frequent or as large. He noticed, but didn’t react.

He didn’t ask what was going on, or why the situation had changed. No one complained about quality or price, so Mike assumed the situation would turn around.

One day he woke up realizing it had been a very long time since he talked to anyone at the bank. A queasy feeling gripped him as he counted backwards and realized how many months had gone by without a single order. His blinders fell away. For the first time, Mike recognized this customer was dead.

Worse yet, he had probably killed them with neglect and indifference. This story has a happy ending. Mike worked hard and resurrected his dead client. He continued to do business with them for the next decade.

Everyone has dead customers and resurrecting them can be the shortest route to new sales. Dead customers represent qualified leads. You already know they buy what you sell. Often enough, they will buy it from you a second time if you go out and re-sell them.

Learn from Mike’s mistake. Sign up for this month's webinar, "Repair Ruptured Relationships, Reawaken Dead Accounts," which is part of the 2010 Webcast Series: Relationship-Building Strategies. For more information, e-mail me at LindaBishop@thoughttransformation.com.

KeFactors Friday: Survival of the fittest - Good Samaritans

A friend of mine had me laughing until I was hoarse about a “who’s on first?” encounter he had with an elderly man and a flat tire. My friend stepped up to help him change the tire and the old man kept repeating, “I gotta go to the bank and cash a check, to pay you for your kindness.”

“I gave him three outs,” my friend recounted. “I suggested he pay it forward by donating money to a church, telling someone he was helped by an alumnus from this school [he was wearing a college shirt at the time], or just give some money to the local children’s hospital. If there was a karmic debt, I didn’t have to be the one to receive the payment.”

The news is filled with stories of cruelty, not just the usual “if it bleeds, it leads” type of crimes, but ones in which insensitivity reigned supreme.

More than ever this year, I’ve been asked to speak on workplace civility: these are minor, banal cruelties — speaking loudly on cell phones while colleagues are trying to work, not helping one’s team when workloads grow heavy, not returning phone calls or emails, indulging in verbal abuse of subordinates, stealing someone else’s food from the breakroom fridge.

In short, putting one’s own needs and interests above another’s. How do you convince someone else to be kind, to empathize with others? You can’t. But consider these things:

• Unless your life has been an abysmal horror, most of us have benefited at one time or another from an act of compassion. If you thought about it, you could probably build a quite a list.
• People forget names, dates, maybe even faces, but they never forget how they were treated—with cruelty, or with kindness. Survivor stories inevitably include accounts of kindness that border on the heroic.
• Everyone has a lousy day, or month, or week. The best way to overcome that agitated feeling is to be kind to someone else in need, even if it’s opening a door.

And, as my friend said, if there is a karmic debt to be paid, you can suggest repayment—but it doesn’t have to come to you. That’s the real gift of kindness.

Getting Past Voice Mail

To get past voice mail, apply intelligent persistence.

• Initiate contact multiple ways - phone, e-mail and mail. Often it takes 10 to 12 contacts before you get a response.
• Leave relevant messages that address pain points.
• Make sure you speak slowly and clearly, so the buyer can understand your name and number and write them down as you speak.
• Your voice is a tool. Be sure you sound friendly and upbeat, even if on the seventh message.
• Buyers will call back when they need what you're selling and they need it now.
  

Apply the Rule of 3

You achieve great success if you're willing to try new selling behaviors at least three times before passing judgement on the behavior's effectiveness.

Try No. 1 gives you the benefit of a new experience.

Try No. 2 allows you to apply what you learned and do it better.

Ditto for Try No. 3, but by now a deeper understanding of actions and outcomes allows you the benefit of wisdom and insight.

Apply the Rule of 3 to learning and sell more.

The Law Of Value

Something to think about...No one pays more for a product or service than they think it's worth.

How Long Do Tough Times Last?

With just two months left in 2010, I wonder how sales people throughout the country are doing despite the economic crisis our country has been forced to deal with. The question most people ask is, "How long do tough times last?"

Following the Great Depression, in which output dropped by 30 percent and over 25 percent of the nation's work force was unemployed, a decade passed before the economy fully recovered. Fortunately for us in sales, no other downturn lasted anywhere near this long and the majority of downturns in the late 20th century lasted less than a year.

Good times always last longer than bad times, and bad times always get better!