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18/11/2009 11:08:26
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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There is another very interesting topic bubbling up in the blogosphere, related to the frenzied stuff around “cold-calling” and that is “customer service”. One thread stated “Online customer-care should be top priority for business” – which is undeniably true – but brought out of the woodwork the observation, from one chap who has been computerising/onlining various call centres that, in his observations, the more that companies have their call-centre walls plastered with “The Customer is King” posters, the worse they are at recognising or believing that to be true.
I love analogies, and the simplicity they offer, so have returned to my favourite time-immemorial “Market Square” (that’s a "social media" space), where two fruit & veg sellers have identical displays of fresh and lovely produce, on display. One is, on average, 10% cheaper and staffed by mindless and disinterested types who really just want your money, and the other has an old-skool charmer who knows “Mrs Goggins” and hundreds of others by name, or at the least has a very engaging…
“yes my darling, what would you like”
…introduction, coupled with an enthusiastic hunt for the very best banana, melon or lettuce he can find, offered up for the nod of approval, before signing off with…
“there you go sweetheart, you’ll love them, see you next week”.
The former has an automated loudspeaker shouting out…
“Get your lovely ‘nana’s here, 10% cheaper!!”
…and the latter only occasionally has to shout out something witty or enquire after the kids, to Mrs G and her mates as she wanders past, to keep a steady queue going.
Who do you think has the brightest future? And is “customer service” something that we can “learn” or is it a state of mind and a personality type?
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08/01/2010 15:46:20
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Mr Bean
Posts 82
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Neil,
I'm a great one for analogies, too. By personal experience and regrettably. I think there's a flaw in your analogy in that the 'market square' isn't one physical place but a series of venues to which the two sellers travel. The 10% cheaper mob provide **ss poor service to a given set of customers then move on a repeat the process elsewhere. They do not require the initial customers to re-purchase as they are too busy making loadsa money fleecing the next queue of punters.
When they get close to having fleeced most of the market and having a dwindling pre-burned prospect base, they morph into another company/product area/market and do the same thing all over again.
I think you probably could guess my view on service-orientation. Service-oriented people share much in common with salespeople but there is a major fundamental difference. This difference is smallest when you compare service-oriented fol with account management-type salespeople (farmers), and greatest when you compare them to new business generators (hunters).
To boil it down to one statement, the actions of service-oriented types are primarily designed help and please others (not themselves) and they are usually nice folk. Salepeople are generally nice folk but the greater the need to 'hunt' in the role undertaken, the greater the degree of selfishness required for sustained success. Which brings us nicely back to my comment on your market square analogy - in purely new business sales, it's the 'non-service' (most selfish) types who do best.
In my experience service-orientation is just like sales-oreintation - it's largely a state of mind and hence personality-based. It can be influenced with training and coaching but you will never convert Mother Theresa into Atilla the Hun (or vice versa).
And like the blogger's 'Customer is King' analogy, my experience of companies plastered with signs proclaiming 'Our staff are our greatest asset' is that they treat their staff like cattle.
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08/01/2010 16:32:58
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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Ah yes, but what we need to agree or assume here, Mr B, is that the only version of new business sales is hunter/killer, surely?
Whereas, in my world anyway (and I suspect for the majority of B2B), it may well be a new account I'm after, which does indeed require tracking down, but the last thing on my mind is how to fleece it for a quick buck. I don't even want to wound it slightly. What I want is for it to follow me home to my nice comfy, safe corral, where I'll feed it, nurture it, look after it and encourage it to breed!
Plus I'll still be out and about looking for more "wild horses", on which I can repeat the same trick - so I'm certainly greedy and self-interested in that respect, but it couldn't ever involve damaging my "prey".
Best - Neil
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08/01/2010 16:37:34
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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P.S. Actually, another bit that I picked up in this context/topic was that your sales staff (or customer service) will tend to treat your customers and prospects in exactly the way that you treat the staff.
"They do what you do, not what you say" in other words.
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09/01/2010 16:53:37
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Mr Bean
Posts 82
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Neil,
I would class your description of your new business generation task as 'strategic sales' and it normally applies either to big-ticket opportunities or service-based long term relationship sales. Most of the Atilla the Hun salespeople I have come across work in high call rate, low order value sales operations. There's no room for 'wham, bam, thank you mam' in those arenas as the timescale is such that the true personaity of the salesperson becomes apparent long before the sales process is concluded.
Your P.S. seems to reflect the truism that company sales culture emanates from the top. You only have to have viewed some of the posts on various forums about the sales tactics used by the energy provider companies to know where the dodgy sales techniques came from.
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09/01/2010 19:14:16
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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Well that’s very true Mr B…
(and you know you can change your username anytime you wanted the “Jeffrey/Jeff” in you to escape, so as to foster a longer term and consistent personal “brand” image across ModSell, LinkedIn and such like Forums where your fans, like me, follow & read – don’t you? I’m just conscious of “Mr B”-ing you in here!)
…assuming I’m reading that the “wham bam…” stuff will not work in the longer, service-based sales?
This makes many of the cross-over comparisons between what works and what doesn’t in B2C and B2B particularly fraught. But I think it’s the multitudes of staff who work in B2C sales that have the most to learn, particularly where those involve “commodities” or “utilities” like energy, telecoms and finance. Because, quite at the opposite end of the spectrum from “quick, clean kill”, most of those “sales” actually involve the buyer in anything up to life changing deals. Examples for me, as a home/office worker and self-employed over much of my adult life have been…
1. Mortgage with nonsense pension plan
2. Banking
3. Multi-media home/office connection
4. Energy
…all of which have had “costs” running into many hundreds or thousands of pounds per annum, for decades. (We could even give “double-glazing” a nod, whilst passing, as we experience the rather draughtier real-world experiences of the current deep freeze than the “demo” unit led us to believe would be the case).
Personally, I actually still pay quite close and definitely personal attention to accounts that may only amount to hundreds of pounds of revenue per annum – but then I do probably have “my time” to deduct from what would otherwise be a comparably high “profit margin”.
Nonetheless, I do think someone in these organisations ought to be aware that there can be a definite resentment that builds up in customers, if they ever get a sniff of the idea that they’ve been sold a pup – or that “customer service” does not seem quite so caring as the attention-levels that the sales person lavished on us – before they got the deal.
As you said above though, it may be a matter of the greatest indifference to both the company and the individual players and sales teams they employ, if the strategy is “slash and burn”. And “it do appear to be so”, from all stakeholders - be they shareholders, Mergers & Acquisitions teams, “old boy network” directorships, “career” managers, and through on down to the frontline troops – if the track records of most in those sectors are anything to go by.
Best - Neil
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09/01/2010 21:35:09
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Mr Bean
Posts 82
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Yes, sorry Neil, a cut & paste problem leading to the insertion of a sentence breaking the logic. The 'no room for wham, bam' refers to your type of sell, not the low value, high call rate where it does pay dividends.
As for your comment regarding the multi-thousand pound adverse effect of commitments you have made in the B2C arena, at the point you made the decision, the 'apparent' commitment was of quite low value. The monthly B/Band charge, the monthly mortgage fee, etc, these probably seemed quite small beer when you made them. It's only when you realise that initial comittment has long term consequences that the full horror of your error of judgement becomes clear, often when it's too late to do much about it. If you were asked to pay 3 years B/Band in advance you may have been more diligent in your selection of vendor.
Unfortunately, the bitter taste of poor servce only seems to have any appreciable effect in stagnant or declining markets. In growing markets there are always more new suckers to be had than there are people unprepared to purchase from those with a poor reputation as a supplier.
I, too, often lavish too much time and attention on people who spend only a few hundred pound with the company. But they pay a fair price and we give everyone the best service we can. Another interesting observation is that EVERY time we have been beaten up on price before the deal was finally agreed (or have been sold the line: "This is just the start, we'll use thousands of tests in a year") the companies concerned have always turned out to be the clients from hell or bought a handful of tests then disappeared into the ether. The same is true of free samples. From bitter exerience we have learned to do nowt for nowt. As the expression goes, if you give something away it has no value. Never a truer word was spoken.
The 'Mr Bean' thing is a bit of a joke. Back in the early 80's when I first ventured into sales I had, since childhood, endured the epithets. 'jumping', mexican, 'green' etc. But as people mature they are less inclined to refer to you as such (at least, face-to-face). Then some time in 83-94 I noticed that when I called companies on the 'phone I experienced an increased amount of sniggering when I introduced myself. Not owning a TV at the time, the reason for this upsurge in poking fun at my name remained a complete mystery until a colleague enlightened me to the antics of Rowan Atkinson!
As I became more experienced and read and listened to sales tips, one I recall was that you needed to be memorable in sales. Not for being a plonker, of course, but if there was something about you than enabled you to stand out from the crowd, then that was likely to be an asset more times than it was likely to be a liability. Given that Mr Bean is effectively world famous, I now often refer to myself as 'The famous Mr Bean'. It breaks the ice, almost invariably generates a laugh and, as a consequence, breaks down some of the initial barriers one meets when dealing with the gatekeeper.
As for 'personal branding', that runs rather counter to my style. Unlike many of the self-styled gurus, motivational speakers and the like who seem solely intent on massaging their egos, I prefer my actions and results to speak for themselves. I'd like to be known for 'knowing my stuff' by those who also 'know their stuff' not just for the sake or celebrity of it. I also want that 'branding' to be associated with Sales Team Focus Ltd, not with me personally.
However, if you feel there would be some merit in a consistent approach across the various platforms, then I will take your advice.
Regards
Jeffrey B
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10/01/2010 15:31:55
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NeilWarren
Posts 645
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Hi Jeffrey
On Cold Calling – and big cold callers = bigger mature industries = rubbish customer service. I think we’re agreed here, pretty well, apart from noting the rather feeble lip-service that the advertisers/marketers are therefore making with campaigns like Aviva claiming that “I’m a name/person, not a number”. And the MBA set running them apparently being aware of such issues as customers costing one heck of lot more to acquire than to keep, but again apparently not knowing much about how to follow-through with this “theory”.
On Personal/Small Business Branding…
What struck me when reading your reply was firstly how very powerful the personal relationship (and story here) is in forging these relationships. I really like this story, and your reasoning, and would therefore simply advise that you consider ways to get the “Mr Bean” angle into your other profiles, like on LinkedIn, rather than vice versa. (I escaped “Bunny Warren” as a schoolboy – and still can’t see a commercial angle on it ;-)
And maybe that is the combined lesson out of the two elements…
You can get as big and global and “brand” as you like Mr Megalithic Corporation (or Wikipedia, or Google – are they doing it better?). But, if you do it at the expense of turning all our touch points with you away from personal/human (sales & customer/service people, who know us and care) into scripted automatons, don’t expect to treat your organisation with any more respect than we would a broken vending machine.
And what does that mean for the tens of thousands of sales and customer service people who work for them?
Best - Neil
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