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Teaming Up With Your Customers
by Brian Tracy
What is the purpose of a business? Every time I ask this question
during a business seminar, the immediate answer that I get back is, “To make a profit”.
But this answer is wrong. The purpose of a business is to create and
keep a customer. If a business successfully creates and keeps customers
in a cost-effective way, it will make a profit while continuing to
survive and thrive. If, for any reason, a business fails to attract or
sustain a sufficient number of customers, it will experience losses. Too
many losses will lead to the demise of the enterprise.
According to Dun and Bradstreet, the single, most important reason for
the failure of businesses in America is lack of sales. And, of course,
this refers to resales as well as initial sales.
So your company’s job is to create and keep a customer, and your job is
exactly the same. Remember, no matter what you official title is, you
are a salesperson for yourself and your company. And the best way to
increase your value as a salesperson is to build your customer base.
The two most important words to keep in mind in developing a successful
customer base are Positioning and Differentiation. Positioning refers
to the way your customers think and talk about you and your company when
you are not there. The position that you hold in the customer’s mind
determines all of his reactions and interactions with you. Your position
determines whether or not your customer buys, whether he buys again and
whether he refers others to you. Everything that you do with regard to
your customer affects the way your customer thinks about you.
Differentiation refers to your ability to separate yourself and your
product or service from that of your competitors. And it is the key to
building a maintaining a competitive advantage. This is the advantage
that you and your company have over your competitors in the same
marketplace, the unique and special benefits that no one else can give your
customer.
When you begin to think about acquiring and keeping customers for life,
you need to think about the particular types of customers for whom your
competitive advantage is so important that they would be poorly served
by using anyone else’s product. You need to then emphasize again and
again that the special features and benefits you offer are so important
that they should not even think of going somewhere else. If, for any
reason, you fail to do this, you may lose the customer and all the work
you’ve done in building that relationship in the first place.
There are three keys to keeping customers for life: relationship
selling, partnering for profit, and consultative selling. These are all
methods for differentiating yourself from anyone else who is offering the
same product or service. They are ways to get customers and keep them. I
will explain each of these in detail.
Relationship Selling is the core of all modern selling strategies. Your
ability to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships is the
foundation for your success as a salesperson and your success in
business. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics
of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.
For your customer, a buying decision usually means a decision to enter
into a long-term relationship with you and your company. It is very
much like a “business marriage”. Before the customer decides to buy, he
can take you or leave you. He doesn't need you or your company. He has a
variety of options and choices open to him, including not buying
anything at all. But when your customer makes a decision to buy from you and
gives you money for the product or service you are selling, he becomes
dependent on you. And since he has probably had bad buying experiences
in the past, he is very uneasy and uncertain about getting into this
kind of dependency relationship.
What if you let the customer down? What if your product does not work
as you promised? What if you don’t service it and support it as you
promised? What if it breaks down and he can’t get it replaced? What if the
product or service is completely inappropriate for his needs? These are
real dilemmas that go through the mind of every customer when it comes
time to make the critical buying decision.
Because of the complexity of most products and services today,
especially high-tech products, the relationship is actually more important than
the product. The customer doesn’t know the ingredients or components of
your product, or how your company functions, or how he will be treated
after he has given you his money, but he can make an assessment about
you and about the relationship that has developed between the two of you
over the course of the selling process. So in reality, the customer’s
decision is based on the fact that he has come to trust you and believe
in what you say.
In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is
the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out others who may
have similar products and services. The quality of the trust bond that
exists between you and your customers can be so strong that no other
competitor can get between you.
The single biggest mistake that causes salespeople to lose customers is
taking those customers for granted. This is a form of ‘customer
entropy’. It is when the salesperson relaxes his efforts and begins to ignore
the customer. Almost 70 percent of customers who walked away from their
existing suppliers later replied that they made the change primarily
because of a lack of attention from the company. Once you have invested
the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality,
trust-based relationship with your customer, you must maintain that
relationship for the life of your business. You must never take it for granted.
Beyond relationship selling, the second key to keeping customers for
life is the ‘partnering for profit’ approach to business sales. When you
deal with a businessperson, you can be sure of one thing: that person
thinks about his business day and night. It is very close to him. It is
dear to his heart. And if you come in and talk to him and ask him
questions about his business, looking for ways to help him run his business
better, the customer is going to warm up to you and want to be
associated with you and your company.
As a partner, you should always be looking to help your customer to cut
costs and improve results in his or her area of responsibility. You
should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well.
You should position yourself as someone who cares more about the
success of your customer than anything else, even more than you care about
selling your product or service. This approach to partnering in profit
with your customer is a key way to differentiate yourself and to keep
your customer for the indefinite future.
There is a principle of reciprocity in business that is extremely
powerful. It is simply this: If you do something nice for someone else, they
will feel obligated to do something nice for you. You should be looking
for opportunities to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid
for, to put in more than you take out. By extending yourself, you improve
your positioning in the customer’s mind and increasingly differentiate
yourself and your company from your competitors who are after the same
business. If you do this long enough and strong enough, you will
eventually develop the partnership to the point where your competitors don’t
have a chance against you.
The third part of keeping customers for life is the consulting approach
to your customer, or what is called consultative selling. When you
position yourself as a consultant, you are really positioning yourself to
serve your customer as a problem solver. Instead of trying to sell
something to your customer, you concentrate all of your efforts and
attention on helping your customer solve his problems, achieve his goals, or
satisfy his needs. You ask excellent questions that help your customer
think through his situation in greater depth. And you listen carefully to
the answers, knowing that listening builds trust.
Most successful salespeople are invariably referred to as friends,
advisors, and counselor by their customers. The final description, and
perhaps the best description customers use for top salespeople, is
contained in the words, “He (or she) really understands my situation”.
When customers are asked why they decided to buy from a particular
salesperson or company, they invariably give these reasons: the reputation
of the company, the level of service and support that the company
offers, the reliability of the company and the salesperson, the
responsiveness of the organization to complaints and requests, and the quality of
the individual salesperson with whom they have been dealing. Price ranks
at number seven or eight, if it comes up at all in the surveys. This is
important for you to know because it is amazing how many salespeople
get sidetracked into negotiating on the basis of price and then they
can’t understand why they failed to get the sale.
84 percent of all sales in America originate from the recommendations
of satisfied customers. A referral to a new customer is worth ten times
more than a cold call. And it is 16 times easier to sell a satisfied
customer something new than it is to sell something to a brand new
prospect. In the final analysis, dedicating yourself to serving your
customers in such a way that you keep them for life is one of the smartest and
most profitable things that you can ever do.
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