Weekly Edge

Who do you trust?

Family members, friends, team members?  

What organizations, businesses, companies have your trust?

What level of trust do these people and groups of people have?

Would you leave your child with them?  Would you trust them to keep secret the most juicy piece of gossip?  Would you trust them to sell your largest asset?

Have they always had your trust or have they had to prove they were worthy of it?

In a business sense, who trusts you?

Would your team members trust you with sensitive information?

Are you the type of person people know can be relied upon to get a job done?

Do your clients trust you (really trust you) or do they simply deal with you?

Too often business owners don’t place enough emphasis on the customer experience their business delivers.

If you ask any random shopper on the street to name their three favourite business’ they purchase from, the three they name will be because of the customer experience they receive.

So, what is customer experience?

It is an intangible mix of the products offered, price compared to the market, service and advice and the physical attributes of the store.

Does this explanation enlighten you?

Or are you now more confused about what customer experience is?

Regardless of whether you are enlightened or confused about customer experience your business will benefit enormously if you spend some time to focus on the customer experience.

Now its time to start planning how you are going to take customer experience to the next level.

Heather here.  Louis the weedy tax accountant is my favourite character in the classic 80’s film Ghostbusters.

At the end of the film after the big marshmallow man bites the dust and the roof is pretty blown off the central park adjacent building – Louise is rescued by the Ghostbusters.

Louis: Who are you guys?

Dr Ray Stantz: We're the Ghostbusters.        

Louis: Who does your taxes?

The world is half up in smoke, a giant man made of confectionary had just caused havoc in the streets and he’s just been trapped inside a crispy underworld dog and yet Louis never misses an opportunity to prospect for new business.

When was the last time you asked someone – Who does your taxes?  (Or your hair, or services your car, or gives you personal training, etc)

According to Jeffery Gitomer ‘Call me back after the holidays’ is the second most-heard objection in sales (first being, ‘Your price is too high,’ Third being ‘I have to think about it.’).  It comes up year after year and salespeople get frustrated year after year, unnecessarily.  Here’s how to think about it and here’s what to do about it….

Salespeople typically hate holidays.  It’s an excuse for decision makers to put buying decisions on hold.  But the worst of them are the Christmas to New Year, ‘Call me back after the holidays,’ and ‘Call me after the first of the year.’  Two of the most hated phrases in sales.  (The still rank behind ‘We’ve decided to buy from someone else.’)

Call me after the holidays is not an objection.  It’s worse.  It’s a stall.  Stalls are twice as bad as objections.  When you get a stall, you have to somehow dance around it, and then you still must find the real objection before you can proceed.

Here are 5 of Jeffery Gitomer’s clever lines and winning tactics to use that will help overcome the stall:

1.      Close on the stall line.  ‘What day after the first of the year would you want to take (what would be most convenient to take) delivery?’

2.      Firm it up, whenever it is.  Ask, ‘When after the first of the year?  Can I buy you the first breakfast of the new year?  Make a firm appointment

3.      If it’s just a call back, make the prospect write it down.  Call backs must be appointed, or the other person is never there when you call.  Writing it down makes it a firm commitment.

4.      Tell them about your resolutions.  ‘I’ve made a New Year’s resolution that I’m not going to let people like you who need our service, delay until after the first of the year.  You know you need it.’

5.      Offer incentives and alternatives.  Develop reasons not to delay.  Bill after the holiday.  Order now, deliver after the holidays.

Wishing you well with your sales.

It doesn’t matter how smart, talented, trained or educated you are, in your business time and time again, you’re going to be hit with questions from prospects and clients to which you don’t know the answers.

A real estate agent showing a house will be asked about the energy efficiency of an appliance, or an accountant will be asked about an obscure tax law, a solicitor will be questioned about a portion of legislation they’re not familiar with.

And many of us will feel a sinking feeling when we’re asked that tricky question. No one likes to say “I don’t know”.

So, here’s an alternative to ‘I don’t know’.  Reply with the question ‘Is that important to you?’

For example, a real estate agent showing a house is asked what type of insulation is in the roof.

Reply – is that important to you?  

Oftentimes the response is “not really” – people are just filling space with conversation and asking may save you a random fact-finding hunt over something of no importance to the person asking the question. 

If however the answer was – Yes, my son has allergies to XXX you could reply – ok, I’ll find out and let you know and you’re further educated as to why the person wants that information and can more specifically track down the correct answer.

Or perhaps try… “Great question, let me find out for you”

Rather than, I don’t know, this leaves the person with a little pat on the back (for a great question) and provided you do what you say you’re going to (find out the answer) you’re golden.

You might try… “Judy in our organisation is our specialist on that, let me find out her thoughts”.  This is an easy way to retain credibility and to make the person feel as though you’re valuing their question by seeking counsel from someone who is a “specialist”.

So let’s stop the sinking feeling of “I don’t know”, and recognise that the other great thing about feeling the “I don’t know” dread is that next time you’re asked that question – you’ll know!

We’ve talked about urgency on many occasions and how frustrated we get when we see business owners act as if they have all the time in the world.  The prevailing attitude we see is this: What doesn’t get done today can always wait until tomorrow.  Now that might be ok for employees, but not the ones working for you though.

With that said, we’re in week 42.  Time is running out for 2018.  Have you got your Christmas promotions happening?  The time to get busy is NOW, not tomorrow.  You’ve got to hustle and make a sprint to the finish line of 2018.

Here’s some tips for getting the most out of the remainder of 2018

1.     Find where the money is.  The old 80/20 rule applies right across the board in all aspects of life.  So start working on the 20% of stuff that brings in 80% of the money.  What is it? How are you going to use it?

2.     Block off times.  Set rigid ground rules for employees and colleagues and block off time that is uninterrupted time.  You need to get busy and can’t get busy when every 5 minutes you are checking email, facebook, or employees are banging on your door.

3.     Get your priorities right.  Don’t let the slightest breeze change your direction for the day.  For example, if you get a bad phone call let it go, get over it, don’t let it interfere with the rest of your day.  Let nothing and nobody get in the road of you and what you have to do.

Hey, life throws us challenges.  It’s up to us how we react to them.

What we do know is that there are only a few weeks to go until the end of the year.  We’re in high gear ensuring our goals are going to be met.

Are you?

Heather here.  Louis the weedy tax accountant is my favourite character in the classic 80’s film Ghostbusters.

At the end of the film after the big marshmallow man bites the dust and the roof is pretty blown off the central park adjacent building – Louise is rescued by the Ghostbusters.

Louis: Who are you guys?

Dr Ray Stantz: We're the Ghostbusters.        

Louis: Who does your taxes?

The world is half up in smoke, a giant man made of confectionary had just caused havoc in the streets and he’s just been trapped inside a crispy underworld dog and yet Louis never misses an opportunity to prospect for new business.

When was the last time you asked someone – Who does your taxes?  (Or your hair, or services your car, or gives you personal training, etc)

Until next week,

Heather & Marcus

So, when is great service really great?

Let’s say we go to a restaurant and sit down.  The waitress is polite, greets us perfectly and serves us so well we feel obligated to order a little more expensive wine.

It’s poured and served with a great skill…

We order our meal and are having a great time…

The meal arrives and it’s bad, we mean really bad.  Now, no matter how good the service, a lack of delivery reminds us that customer service is about the whole experience, not just the interaction.

It doesn’t matter how good the WOW factor is, if you can’t deliver the basics…

So, here’s our 3 steps…

1. Deliver with consistency.  This is by far the most important of the three steps.  Every time someone calls your company, the phone should be answered the same way, the orders processed systematically, the services delivered with regularity so I can trust that you know what you are doing and I can feel good about coming back and referring my friends.  Remember, you can’t WOW a customer until you have at least satisfied them.
2. Make it easy for people to buy.  Consistency is a start, but if you make it hard to do business with you, then no-one can ever be WOW’ed.  Everything from ability to contact people, websites, emails to payment methods, delivery choices and so on.  All of these things you need to make sure you are easier or at least as simple and easy as any of your competitors.  Ring them, go to their websites, do as much market research as you need to, to make sure buying from you is both simple and easy.
3. WOW people.  Satisfaction is boring, you have to do something your customers don’t expect.  Check your industry and then check 3 or 4 others to find out what is now expected as standard so you can dream up a strategy to WOW people.

Remember, great service is one thing, satisfaction with what someone is buying, backed up with great WOW type service is what counts.

Do you know what your Moments of Truth are?  They are times when it really counts to impress someone with your service.

Do you know what yours might be?

Take the time now to list as many of them as you can.  Be ruthless with yourself.  A good place to start is with your customer interaction.

Once you’ve jotted down some of your Moments of Truth, you’ll begin to see why it is customers leave you for a competitor.  You’ll begin to develop ideas to stop this in its tracks.

Before we go any further, here’s some statistics about why customers leave that may startle you.  They are:

1% due to death

3% due to a house move

5% due to buying from a friend

9% due to being sold by a competitor

14% due to finding a better product or price

68% due to perceived indifference

These figures are staggering.  68% of your customers leave because they perceive your business to be indifferent to their needs.  They feel you just don’t care.

Now look at how many leave because of the efforts of your opposition.  The figures are so small as to be almost negligible.  Only 9% are swayed by the active efforts of your competitors, while a mere 14% find a more attractive deal elsewhere.

Remember the 80:20 rule?  If you were to really do well with only 20% of your customers, you’d be looking after those that account for 80% of your revenue.  So how hard is it to hang on to that 68% slice of customers who leave just because they think you don’t care about them?  Putting this another way, how easy would it be to retain that 20% of customers who contribute the most to your bottom line just by treating them well?  Why do all the difficult (and costly) things to shore up your bottom line when a simple remedy like offering great customer service can do it for you?

It’s often said there are customers, and there are customers.  How true this is.

There are those customers you’d love to deal with every day, and there are those you’d wish never came back.  But there are more than just two basic groups.  We think of customers in four categories, A, B, C and D.  That is

               A – Awesome customers

               B – Basic customers

               C – Can’t deal with customers

               D – Dead customers

You might wish to only work with the A’s and B’s.  If that’s the case you get rid of the rest or educate your C’s to become B’s.  So how do you do that?  Simple.  Tell them.  Or set up rules for doing business, then write to everyone on your database, explaining you’re repositioning your business and here are the new rules.  You can also change your pricing policy or the décor of your premises – this alone will filter out those you don’t want.

For example, a video store wanted to shake off the young hooligans who had taken to gathering there.  All they did was change the type of music they played in the store.  Instead of playing music teenagers listen to, they began playing classical music.  Their client base changed virtually overnight.

If you were to really analyze your business, you’d find that 20% of your customers account for 80% of your business.  This is what we call, the 80-20 rule.  Do you know who your 20% are?  These are the ones you should be concerning your efforts on.