How Good Are Your Key Touch Points In Sales?
Jan Carlzon’s book “Moments Of Truth” should be standard reading for everyone in business and particularly those of us in sales. He talks about taking over as CEO of the Scandinavian Air Services (SAS) airline when the company was failing and had terrible consumer reviews, regarding their service. With his team, they identified every touch point on the customer journey with the airline, to discover where the gaps were located. We should be doing the same with our business.
Now you might be thinking that is the CEOs job, not the work of a humble salesperson. You would be wrong!!! The client sees you as their guy or gal inside your company and they expect you to fix everything for them. That includes fixing things before they even become a problem.
The marketing department takes care of the website, the social media, the advertising, the collateral materials, etc. As a salesperson, you won’t have much input into that degree of detail. Nevertheless feedback what you are hearing from clients, so that marketing can do a better job of representing the firm to the buyers. As a salesperson, you can take care of your own social media and make sure that any materials you present to the client are up to date and in pristine condition.
Clients do a lot of shopping on-line before they meet us today and that includes looking at our own social media. What are they going to find? You in a club doing the limbo dance, dressed in board shorts and a T-shirt, totally off your face and looking outrageous? Or you in a business suit, looking professional and plausible as a business partner? You can’t control marketing’s activities, but you can control what you put up on social media and therefore you can control your own professional image.
For example, I have two Facebook accounts – one for business with around 5000 people connected to me and one for my karate mates, with about 30 people on it. I have 24,000 followers on LinkedIn and the content is always professionally related to subjects around leadership, sales, communication and presenting, because that is what we sell. I try to control what buyers see of me before we ever meet.
When people call your company, what do they hear? In Japan, in 99.999% of cases, the person answering the phone won’t venture forth their name, is not pleasant, happy you called or excited to do some business with a possible new commercial partner. They are guarded, cautious, stiff and sound like they hate their job. First impression management in Japan is a concept that hasn’t hit these shores as yet. Well now, how do you answer the phone yourself? Are you very “business-like”, that is, you sound serious, terse and unfriendly? Get your phone Voice Memo app ready and the next time you answer the office phone, tape yourself and play it back – you might be shocked at how unhelpful you sound forming that vital first impression with your initial greetings.
When you send emails do you have a signature block bursting with contact information so the client doesn’t have to do any work to find your contact details? How do you start the email? Are you straight down to business or do you try to build some rapport? Japan has some set pieces here, but that is the problem, everyone uses them, so people’s eyes glaze over and they don’t bother reading the first couple of sentences. I have disciplined myself to make the first word of every email I send start with the word “thanks”, whether it is outbound or in reply. I never get these types of greetings myself, so I know it is differentiated and not common. That is good. I want to stand out in a crowded field of people selling to my buyers.
We can’t go through every touch point in this piece, but at least let’s start thinking about how many touch points we have with clients and what is the current quality level like? Look at how can we improve the current reality and how to maintain a consistent professional level of interaction with buyers. When your competitors are just doing the same old, same old, you win.
