Customer Service – Page 3 – thoughtLEADERS, LLC: Leadership Training for the Real World

A Simple Way to be More Professional

December 20, 2017/1 Comment/in Business Toolkit, Communications, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

When salespeople call you to explore working with you, a simple technique can help you appear much more professional. If you’re not interested, just say so. Immediately.

Over the 14 years I’ve run my firm, I’ve heard a polite “no, thank you” more times than I can count. That’s fine. Rejection, especially when it’s quick, enables me and my team to spend our time on more fruitful conversations.

It’s the silence that kills me. And I know I’m not alone in this. I’ve spoken with countless executives, entrepreneurs, and salespeople over the years and there’s a common pet peeve – people who simply don’t respond to your messages.

It’s unprofessional folks. It’s discourteous. And if you were the one being ignored, you’d see how unpleasant and frustrating it can be.

“But Mike, I get so many sales calls and some of them are so pushy and I’m so busy so I don’t have time to respond.”

Yes, there are idiot salespeople who don’t know how to take “no” for an answer. That’s not what I’m talking about here.

What I’m talking about are the respectful salespeople and entrepreneurs who legitimately believe their product or service is a fit for you and your organization. They draft a polite email or leave a courteous voicemail. Then they wait patiently for a reply.

And they wait.

Eventually they’ll follow up a couple of months later to check in. And again, they get no response.

Here’s the important thing to realize – you’re wasting their time and coming across as unprofessional. And those salespeople and entrepreneurs have long memories. By ignoring them rather than being candid that they’re not a fit, you’re taking a risk without even realizing it.

5 Questions You Must Answer to Measure Your Business Well

November 29, 2017/0 Comments/in Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Leadership /by Mike Figliuolo

Focusing on metrics is key to achieving your desired business results—but it can be difficult to determine which metrics actually matter. There are five major questions you need to answer to ensure the metrics you’re measuring matter and you can take action based upon what they tell you.

Some metrics are easy to put numbers to. Revenue, inventory levels, and customer retention are solid numbers. Knowing those quantitative measures is essential to understanding your business. That said, you also need to measure qualitative aspects of your business like associate engagement and customer satisfaction.

Regardless of the measurement you need to answer five things about it:

1. What’s the measurement’s purpose? Know the significance of the metric and what you’ll change in your business based on the numbers you measure.

2. What data source will you use? Different sources of data can yield different results.

3. How will you calculate the metric? Define a formula, especially for complex measures.

4. How frequently will you measure? Measuring takes effort. Be efficient and only measure as frequently as you need to.

5. Who will review the measure? Define the stakeholders who are going to receive the reports.

For qualitative measures, the data gathering method is critical. Use a simple and standard method wherever possible. Consistency matters over time so you can get true trend data. Put thought into the measures up front so you’re not changing them frequently and invalidating data you’ve already collected.

My firm conducts classroom training. At the end of each course, we’ve asked the same 14 qualitative questions for the last 13 years. Regardless of the class we’re teaching, the instructor teaching it, or which client we’re teaching it for, it’s always the same 14 questions. What that enables me to do is get a true sense of trend data and compare instructors, clients, and courses over time. I can look at a course that I just taught yesterday and see how it stacks up versus something I taught last year or even last decade. That consistency gives me a richness of data to analyze.

As you think about the measures for your organization think about both the quantitative and qualitative ones and apply those five questions to everything you’re going to measure.

Sometimes you’ll want to create your own measure in order to capture a unique aspect of your business or to drive a specific behavior. When building these unconventional measures, articulate the purpose of measuring it, and specify how long you’ll measure it, especially if it’s being used to drive short-term performance.

4 Questions to Make Difficult Switching Decisions Much Easier

July 31, 2017/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Guest Blogger, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

In an age of too many options, four simple questions can provide a clear approach to making those frequent decisions in a way that saves us time.

Today’s post is by Jack Quarles, author of Expensive Sentences (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

We live in a time of unprecedented options. Those of us in developed economies of the 21st century, even with average incomes, have more choices than ever before in what we eat, what we wear, our jobs, where we live or travel, our entertainment and education… and the list goes on.

Our ability to customize the details of our lives is dazzling, but it is not free. Abundant options require abundant decisions, and decisions require energy. Life’s never-ending buffet brings byproducts: too many options can paralyze us, and fear of taking the wrong option can haunt us.

We can benefit from thinking about how we make decisions, and intentionally adopting practices that help us manage the cost of decision-making and feel more confident in the choices we do make.

Let’s examine a class of decision that we face every day: stay or go, fish or cut bait, keep on the same path or change direction. More specifically, we’ll consider people and companies we pay, whether at work or at home:

Do I like my accountant, or is it time to switch?
Should I change gyms?
Do we need a new marketing consultant?
Is our lawn care guy charging us too much?

There are both cost and benefit components to these questions. If your gym is nearby and your friends go there, it may be worth twice the price of a different gym with the same equipment because you’re more likely to go and use it. That’s an easy case. Other decisions aren’t so easy, and sometimes those questions of “Am I paying too much for this?” keep lingering in our mind without a clear answer.

Replacing Gray with Black and White

Selling by Word Alone Doesn’t Cut It in Today’s Market

May 1, 2017/0 Comments/in Books, Communications, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Selling isn’t just about the words you pitch. A much more powerful approach is to show the customer your work and let them interact with it early in the sales process.

Today’s post is by Ken Rutsky, author of Launching to Leading (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

In an 1899 speech in Philadelphia, Missouri Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver is reported to have said,

“I come from a state that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I’m from Missouri, and you have got to show me.”

And from that day forward, Missouri has been known far and wide as the “Show Me State.”

Today, marketers and sales teams alike should take heed of this advice and move beyond telling and describing their value to showing and demonstrating it to buyers early and often in the buying cycle. After all, what’s really left to tell since the customer has probably already visited your website?

There is no shortage of materials and advice out there on the topic of content marketing. Content Rules, by Handley and Chapman—a popular book in marketing circles—spends a lot of time focusing on just that; and it is necessary and recommended reading and table stakes for today’s sales and marketing efforts.

However, stopping there would fail to take two critical variables into account: engagement and experience, the “Show Me” factor of modern sales and marketing efforts. One of the hallmarks of breakthrough market leadership is very high levels of engagement and experience delivered in our marketing programs and sales experience.

We can look at both engagement and experience as continuums. Engagement measures the level of interaction that the customer has with our content; we are most engaged when we are interacting, least when we are reading. Engagement, through multiple senses and interaction, creates memorable content-marketing engagements.

From an experience perspective, we can describe or demonstrate our value, or have the customer participate in understanding the value. Communication of value via experience is vastly more effective at winning customers’ preference than description. The combination of engagement and experience is the holy grail of marketing and sales effectiveness. Let’s take a look at an example:

3 Things You Must Get Right if You Want Happier Customers

January 23, 2017/0 Comments/in Books, Business Toolkit, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

Customer loyalty takes just as much energy to build as new customer growth. Unfortunately companies spend too much time focusing on new customers and not taking care of the ones they already have.

Today’s post is by Noah Fleming, author of The Customer Loyalty Loop (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Most executives I talk to feel like they’re drowning in data and yet anyone and everyone within the organization is telling them they need more and more data! Do you ever feel overwhelmed with all the things you need to worry about, let alone the collection of “big data” with the belief that data might help you generate better customer relations, or a more loyal customer?

I’m going to let you in on a big secret. The companies and clients that I work with who are at the top of their games, or continuously increasing revenue are only really placing a concerted effort on three key areas. I’m going to warn you, there’s nothing ground-breaking here that you don’t already know, but how these companies are focusing on these areas might surprise you.

I’ll tell you until the cows come home that most organizations are too focused on the new customer at the expense of their existing customers, but I’m also a realist. The current customer is the beating heart of any great business, but you need new customers to grow. Anybody who tells you otherwise should be thrown from your office. Today we’re going to about new and existing customers.

The first area that these companies excel in is their uncanny ability to sell to their existing customers more often. I said sell, not just “market to,” and not just putting offers in front of them, but selling. You need the same level of gravitas and effort that is put towards new customer acquisition, applied to selling more to your existing customer base. That requires a customer retention process. Most businesses have a sales process but not a retention process. The best companies do.

I once heard an author and marketer say that all great sales and marketing is just about sharing your message over and over again. He might have been half right, once. A decade ago, maybe a quarter right. Now, it’s more like a tenth.

If you want to sell to your prospects and existing customers either the first time or the sixth time, then you need to get three things right. But you need to get them right, all the time and every time.

Awareness

3 Ways to Tap Into the Link Between Service and Sales

April 4, 2016/0 Comments/in Books, Communications, Customer Service, Entrepreneur, Guest Blogger, Leadership, Sales /by Mike Figliuolo

There are three keys to tapping into the link between service and sales – technical prowess, hospitality, and the wow factor. If you’re able to get your organization to focus on these three elements of service delivery, you can expect outstanding results.

Today’s post is by Donna Cutting, author of 501 Ways to Roll Out the Red Carpet for Your Customers (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

The character Don Draper in the television show Mad Men once said something to the effect of, “The day you sign a client is the day you start losing them.” While Mr. Draper is a fictional character, his words couldn’t be truer.

A study by Harris Interactive in 2011 determined that 89 percent of consumers quit doing business with a company (and went to a competitor) because of a bad customer experience. Compare this to 59 percent in 2007 and you’ll see that one of two things is happening. Either customer service has gotten worse; or consumers are becoming empowered. Perhaps both are true.

Your customers have more choices and louder voices than ever before. It probably won’t shock you that, according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs report, news of a bad customer experience reaches more than twice as many ears as praise for a positive one.

However, take heart! The good news is that 55 percent of consumers are willing to recommend a company due to outstanding service over product or price. (source: Consumer Impact Report by Harris Interactive/Right Now, 2010.)

There is a direct link between sales and service. The real sale is made after you earn the customer. Once you get them in the door, it’s time for you to decide. Is it uphill or downhill from there?

There are three specific areas of customer service you’ll want to pay attention to: Technical, Hospitality and WOW!