BIZBUZZ: Cy Charney: The Salesperson’s Handbook

Hi, I’m Gary Brown, a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to episode 16 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations in order to help business owners imagine a future state of affairs that is different from their present state.

The following video highlights some content from The Salesperson’s Handbook, written by Cy Charney.  The focus is recognizing what constitutes excellent customer service.

I am going to comment on the basic customer needs that are identified by Charney.

He suggests that customers have a handful of basic needs. Customers want to feel safe; they want to be treated as special; they have a need to feel successful; they want things done right the first time and customers want to get things done efficiently.

This raises a question in my mind. If basic needs are being met, how focused on price do we need to be?

Charney also introduces an appropriate quotation from Aristotle. He stated that “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”. I wonder how many of us realize that habits are acquired through practice?  Sometimes, I can’t help but think that some more practice is needed!

Well, that’s it for The Saleperson’s Handbook.
Thanks for watching.

Your comments are always welcome.
Stay tuned for more BIZ BUZZ.

Hurry, hard!

The expression in my title is an oft used expression that you hear at a curling rink.

I’ve recently gone back to the game of curling after a very long absence.  I know that it’s been a long absence because all of the muscles in my chest wall and arms are telling me so.  That said, I think that curling holds some useful metaphors for those of us who are interested in business success.

As you might know, curling is played on a sheet of ice. At each end of the ice surface, there is a target (called the house) painted onto the ice.  Two teams, of four players each, takes turns sliding (called throwing) a curling stone (rock) towards the house, at one end of the ice, and points are scored for the team with the rock(s) closest to the centre of the house.

In a business sense, the house represents the goal(s) that a business establishes for itself. The rocks that are thrown represent the efforts expended to reach the goals. However, the opposing team (ie the competition) is also trying to achieve their goals at the expense of you attaining yours.  The rocks that they throw become obstacles that you must overcome.

You can attempt to remove the obstacles that are in your way by hitting those with one or more of your rocks.  Or, you can attempt to go around the obstacle.  In either situation, you are intentionally dealing with situations that are hindering the attainment of your goal.  With each throw taken, the situation on the playing surface will change.

You could say that curling mimics our business life.

The important thing to remember is that we must attempt to overcome our obstacles if we are serious about achieving our goals.  Of course, we might not be successful.  However, in my mind, the only failure comes from not trying.

How to Win the B2B Price War

In this world of high speed communication and 140 character limits, we seem to have become infatuated with short forms and acronyms.  It isn’t too hard to draw the comparison between our communications today and the game of horseshoes. In other words, we use vocabulary with less precision than a given word actually conveys, but that’s okay because getting close seems to be good enough.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or is it?

 

 

What has this got to do with pricing you might ask? We invariably talk about the cost or price of a product or service that we are either buying or selling. However, when we are ‘on our game’, we’ll use the word investment or introduce the idea of value. Unfortunately, old habits die hard and it is very easy to forget to reinforce the result that one can achieve from an investment that has been made.

Now, we might ask ourselves, “what’s the big deal?” In my mind, the big deal results when we think about the behaviour and attitude that are generally attached to the words cost and investment.

Costs are generally meant to be controlled. Costs tend to be something that we either want to avoid, reduce or, at a minimum, hold constant.  The word cost tends to cause us to think in terms of such adjectives as “expensive”. If ‘how much does this cost‘ is an early question asked by the prospect, then chances are we have not established our value proposition with this person.  It will also be difficult for us to know how to clearly articulate our value proposition if we have not identified the emotion that underlies a prospect’s initial interest in our product or service.  Without this knowledge, we are simply ‘pulling on levers’ without knowing if the levers are connected to anything of meaning to the prospect.

So, … we’ll be in a much better position if we can not only understand the prospect’s stated need, but also the underlying emotional reason for this need. With this understanding firmly in hand, we can speak much more confidently about the return that is possible with the investment being considered. We’ll understand how our product or service can address the emotional need of the prospect. We’ll be able to speak about the value to be derived from the investment being contemplated.

If we’ve made the emotional connection with our prospect, then the level of trust that the prospect ascribes to us will be much higher.  A trusting relationship supported by our understanding of the emotion driving the prospect will greatly diminish any focus on price and solidly centre the conversation on value. Price may not be part of the discussion.

In the parlance of horsehoes, a ‘ringer’ could be just the next ‘pitch’ away.

To Be Different or Not (at Your Peril)

It’s easy to talk about being different.

We can all sagely nod our heads and claim that we fully understand the importance of differentiation. We all get the notion that we need to be different in our offering, in some meaningful way, if we are going to successfully attract and retain customers.

The next question is the one that seems to cause us some issue.

Do we actually implement some type of differentiation in our business?

My informal, non-scientific observations suggest that our understanding of differentiation frequently gets parked at the door. We seem to be so immersed in the day-to-day minutiae of running our businesses, that we overlook what it takes to stand out from our competitors. Prospects can buy from us; buy from our competitors or not buy at all. If we don’t focus on maintaining some type of compelling differentiation within our business, why should anyone care?

In Harvey Thompson’s book Who Stole My Customer, he claims that the top two major reasons for losing prospects or customers is lack of courtesy followed by lack of competence. These are both staff related issues. Both speak to skills that can be learned. Both suggest areas where a differentiation strategy could pay significant dividends to the business.  [learn more about Who Stole My Customer in episode 10 of BIZBUZZ]

Phil Kotler (of marketing fame) states that the company that stops getting better gets worse.

Getting better is a conscious decision taken by the business owner. It involves a focus on differentiation.  Better must, by definition, indicate a better experience for our customers.

Are you engaging in a periodic review of your differentiation strategy, in this very crowded space that we occupy?  If you’re not, beware!

 

Aim Higher. Be Different.

We are now into week two of the 2014 Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

If you are Canadian, you are likely one of many holding our collective breath to see how we do in such events as ice hockey, curling and skating.  Naturally, the team or individual that wins a given event will have to be the best on the day of that particular competition.

In my mind, competition is not only about being better, but also about being different.

Those athletes who are measured both quantitatively and qualitatively, such as figure skaters, are judged better when they are different.  The chosen degree of difficulty, the music selected and the energy brought to the routine all contribute to the skaters being different.  Like all Olympians, the skaters’ goal is to be stronger, faster, more agile and more focused.  They push themselves to be more daring; to use every reserve of energy.  They push themselves to be better; to be DIFFERENT.

And they train relentlessly.

What are we ‘business athletes’ doing to be DIFFERENT from our competitors?  Do we spend time thinking about and then implementing the steps that we might take to wow our customers?  Are we focusing our efforts on providing a customer experience that far exceeds ‘meeting expectations’?

Like the Olympians, our business efforts are being judged.  Our performance standard is set by our competitors.  But, the judge in our case is every single customer and every single prospect.

If we are not being DIFFERENT in our businesses, how do we stand apart from our competitors?  How do we get chosen?

Fundamentally, it is a choice that we make.

What choice are you making?

BIZBUZZ: D. Sanders – Built To Serve

This is episode 6 of BIZBUZZ.

I stimulate conversations that challenge business owners to consider new possibilities and to Act Boldly.  The following video highlights some of the comments from Dan Sanders’ book Built To Serve that resonated with me.

Hi, I’m Gary Brown a FocalPoint business coach.

Welcome to BIZBUZZ.

I’ve chosen to comment on Built To Serve, a book written by Dan Sanders that deals essentially with the subject of leadership.

I’d like to highlight three observations from the book that interest me.

The first deals with vision.  Sanders contends that vision is about an organization’s purpose.  It’s the heart of an entity.  It has more to do with significance than success.  I couldn’t agree more.  Too often vision statements get used to paper over cracks in the lobby wall.

My next observation deals with mission statements.  I’ve found that people sometimes treat vision and mission as synonyms, when in fact Sanders identifies mission as ‘what you do to achieve the vision’.  How does your organization view these two statements?

My final comment deals with Sander’s contention that leaders interested in long term success should regularly ask themselves these three questions:

1. what have we done for our customers?
2. What have we done for our employees?
3. What have we done for our community?

If we are built to serve, these three questions seem very logical.  They might be logical but do we do anything with them?  Do we see them as central to our role as leaders?

That’s it for Built To Serve.

Stay tuned for more BIZBUZZ

Your comments are always welcome.