MEET YOUR ENTIRE SALES team. Pete is the office manager and is the first person most prospects and clients interface with on the phone or in person. Joan is the head of customer service. Her team troubleshoots client problems and questions. Frank is the warehouse manager and oversees all shipping and receivables. Cynthia is the chief marketing officer and is charged with all things marketing, including lead generation for your sales team. Danita is the director of IT and oversees the technical staff that installs your product and services.
Sales is not a department. Each person at your company has the ability to make a first impression, second impression, and third impression on your prospects and clients. That impression and interaction may very well determine whether this client becomes an advocate for your company or your competitor’s next client.
Unfortunately, many members of your extended sales team haven’t been taught formal sales, communication, or emotional intelligence skills. This thinking is really shortsighted because these individuals are the very people handling the sale after the sale. These teams install your product and services. They troubleshoot issues and questions with customers. They educate customers on how to use a new product or service, ensuring the customer feels that they are receiving a return on investment.
Think about how client conversations would be enhanced if everyone at your company received education around:
• Communicating with different personality styles
• Empathy
• Emotion management
• Emotional self-awareness
• Impulse control
• Assertiveness
Without proper training and education, the client experience is diminished. Those hard-earned new clients that come in the front door too often take a quick exit out the back door. Research shows that U.S. companies lose $136 billion to avoidable consumer switching. Ouch!
According to research by the Peppers & Rogers Group, customers rely on their emotional experiences with salespeople more than any of the traditional factors. They found that 60 percent of all customers stop dealing with a company because of what they perceive as indifference on the part of salespeople.
This interpretation of indifference often occurs because the sale-after-the-sale team is not provided with emotional intelligence skill training, particularly training in empathy. Sales is not a department, and every interaction with a customer is a chance to enhance the sale or blow the sale.
Your support team and anyone interfacing with customers is a salesperson; they are part of the sales team!
Empathy and the Sale after the Sale
Reflect on your own experiences in buying a product or service. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar to the scenario below.
Cynthia has set aside two precious hours of time to wait for the cable tech. She waits and waits and waits and finally receives a call from Joe, the customer service person. The conversation sounds like, “Cynthia, I understand the tech missed the two-hour window. I know this is frustrating. Thank you for your business.”
Cynthia becomes even more upset, thinking, “If you understood my frustration, you’d do a better job of describing it!” The trigger-response-regret loop starts and Cynthia vents mightily at Joe, who is helplessly staring at his new certificate that reads Customer Relationship Graduate.
This entire conversation would change if the person dealing with an upset client had been taught real-world empathy. Joe could have diffused Cynthia’s anger by demonstrating that he really did understand what she was thinking or feeling around a missed appointment. Let me give you an example of extreme empathy using the same example.
Joe calls Cynthia and demonstrates real-world empathy, extreme empathy. “Cynthia, I understand our tech, Pete, missed the two-hour window.” Pause. “You must think he’s a moron. And I am sure you’re really ticked off because you have a busy schedule and we managed to waste two hours of that schedule. Now, you’re wondering how in the heck you are going to be able to fit a new appointment in your calendar. Oh, and on top of that, you had a lot of companies from which to choose to do business and you are wondering why did I choose XYZ company? Am I correct?”
Yes, that’s an example of extreme empathy. And it’s exactly what the customer is thinking. This type of conversation actually diffuses the emotional reaction from customers because they feel heard and understood. Customers recognize they don’t have to fight for their position anymore. Their fear of not being understood fades away.
Am I advocating that you throw your fellow team members or company under the bus? Of course not. The example is to get your attention and get you focused on teaching the sale-after-the-sale team empathy skills.
Customers can’t hear solutions to fixing a problem until they know and believe your entire sales team understands their perspective. In today’s competitive business environment, customers that don’t feel an emotional connection take their business elsewhere.
Empathy Changes the Conversation
We worked with a large distribution company’s sales support team a few years ago. If you know anything about distribution, it’s an industry that will experience fulfillment issues, even at well-run companies. Missed deadlines, wrong product ordered, wrong product shipped, incorrect color, and the list goes on. During our assessment, we discovered the root cause for many of the fulfillment issues were actually mistakes made by the customer. The sales manager and sales team recognized it didn’t matter who caused the problem. They focused on getting it right rather than being right. Their goal was to provide extreme customer support. We conducted real-world empathy sales training and the team got it. They did a terrific job of changing the conversation when receiving calls from upset customers. Here are a few examples of the responses we co-created with the team in dealing with customer service issues:
• “Sorry for the stress we are causing you because I’m guessing your customers are upset, calling you nonstop because of this missed deadline.”
• “I’m so sorry you’re having to deal with this because I’m pretty sure you have fifteen other priorities that have to get done. And now, you have to waste time calling me to fix a problem that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
The team reported great success in diffusing frustrated clients. They found that customers were open to hearing new ways of preventing problems because the customers felt like the support team understood their world. The empathy first and advice second principle worked well in creating an emotional connection with customers and preventing future problems.
Get Out of Your Office and into Your Customer’s Office
How many people in your company, other than salespeople, meet with clients on a regular basis to truly understand a day in the life of your customers? There is nothing that replaces time spent with clients and hearing firsthand what’s working or not working.
I was reminded of this important practice while reading Melinda Gates’s book, The Moment of Lift. The Gates Foundation is doing remarkable work around the world. One of the many reasons for their success is that members of their team aren’t making decisions just from Excel spreadsheets and data. They are doing the hard work of traveling to remote villages and connecting face-to-face with the very people they are trying to help. What they’ve learned over the years is that you can’t come up with the right solutions if you aren’t talking to the people on the inside, in their case, impoverished women and children.
Take a lesson from the Gates Foundation and get members of your team into your customers’ villages. Talk to the people on the inside, your customers. During those conversations, your team will hear firsthand the new demands your customers are facing from their customers. They’ll hear new threats your customers are facing from new competitors or industry disruption. The only way your company can create new and better solutions is to get out of the office and into the offices of clients. Your customers are the insiders that have the answers.
It might behoove the director of operations to accompany salespeople on account business review calls. These conversations allow her to hear what your company and their department can do to make life easier for customers.
Schedule calls with your top clients and your customer service director. Surveys are nice, but live conversations are even better. Follow Janelle Barlow’s advice. She is a customer service expert and teaches her clients to proactively seek out complaints. Barlow knows that complaints are a gift because research shows that most customers don’t complain. They just go away.
Check out these stats: 96 percent of unhappy customers don’t complain; however, 91 percent of those unhappy customers will simply leave and never come back, according to 1 Financial Training Services.
Why don’t customers complain? Many feel it’s too much work. Others feel that it just won’t make any difference. That attitude changes dramatically when you’ve got a live human being sitting in front of you sincerely asking for your complaints and insights on how to better partner with you.
Relationships Start at Home
No one has time for relationships. You make time for relationships. Why do you think couples schedule date night?
Relationships start at home and they start with you, Mr. or Ms. Sales Leader, building relationships with your extended sales team and the other departments that help your sales team retain and serve clients. It takes a sales village to win and retain business. Schedule time to visit other departments to observe a day in their lives.
It Takes a Sales Village
One of our sales leaders in the managed print services business immediately implemented our advice and invested more time listening to calls being fielded by her company’s customer support team. She quickly recognized that many of the calls coming in from customers could be prevented with clearer expectations set by her sales team.
The sales team brainstormed on how to prevent repeatable problems and questions being experienced by new clients. They embraced my philosophy that if a problem is repeatable, it’s preventable. The sales team worked hard and created a better onboarding process for new clients. One step in the process included a videoconference with the new client and a member of the tech support team. During the meeting, they reviewed specific details such as delivery times and location of new equipment, even though those details had already been discussed with the salesperson. They brought up potential sales elephants that could occur with installation such as delays in delivery because a prior install took longer than expected.
The personal conversations between the new client and tech support team created an emotional connection and changed the conversation. The technician went from being just a voice on the phone or a signature line on an email. New clients liked putting a name to a face and were happy to be connecting with a live human being. Client happiness went up, as did client retention and referrals.
Sales managers, encourage other department managers to attend your sales meetings. On the outside, sales looks like a glamorous profession, filled with travel, expensive dinners, and golf. It’s eye opening for other departments to learn the tenacity, courage, and hard work it takes to be successful in sales. Sitting in an airport for five hours and arriving home past midnight isn’t glamorous. Hearing stories about aggressive competitors and the work it takes to compete and win business creates a healthy respect for the sales talent in the room.
Sales is not a department. It takes a sales village to win and retain business. Build your sales village and you will build better client relationships.
Sales Leaders EQ Action Plan
1. Encourage and support the development of sales and communication skills in other departments in the company.
2. Get out of the office. Invite other departments to join your sales team on calls with prospects and clients.
3. Examine your onboarding process for new clients. What repeatable problems are you encountering that could be prevented?
4. Build relationships with other departments in your company.
5. Preach and teach that sales is not a department. It takes a sales village to win and retain business.