“Enter as a stranger, leave as a friend” ~ I love this quote!
This tells you right up front, you are more than a customer. We are looking for a relationship, a team relationship.
It is the little things that count. Recently, I was out to dinner with a couple of buddies catching up at a small restaurant with outside dining. During the course of dinner five different people came to our table to check in on us to make sure everything was good. This was a deliberate customer service technique, while developing a “team” working environment who all had a desire to serve. Will we be going back? You bet! Did we leave favorable comments on social media? YES! It was a great experience! Isn’t that someplace you would like to go?
So, let’s stop for a minute and ask a couple of questions.
- Is there a “Team” environment in your work place?
- Do you have service after the sale? Do you have service during the sale?
- What are you doing to make sure you and your employees are delivering a level of service that BLOWS people away? Makes them want to talk about you and share the experience?
Businesses have a habit of spending a great deal of money to find new customers only to have little or no effort on retaining them or expanding their relationship beyond their first needs.
In one of my first sales leadership positions, I found myself in the middle of the Mojave Desert with a 35-year mining business. So how do you sell more rocks to a marketplace that already considers you one of the industry leaders?
Service, Education and a Relationship
After learning how to drill rock, crush rock, truck rock and I could learn about rock and the seventeen (17) different natural colors of rock we mined, I set out to meet our clients who covered the entire west coast.
Over the course of six months our team was able to increase sales by over 30%, which was achieved by sharing and educating with our clients, face-to-face. We discovered that our clients were aware of only a fraction of our products.
We live in an amazing time, with technology that has both helped us do business better and some could make an argument that has hurt the way we do business.
Take a moment to down shift and ask yourself – Would you like to be treated as a stranger or a friend? Odds are you would prefer the relationship.
Take steps to make change, it will make a difference.
