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Excellent Customer Service: The Secret Ingredient

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published by sfcg on June 28, 2011 - 1:59pm

As a lifelong entrepreneur, I’ve developed the basic habits for frugality and stuck by them. Travel is a big expense in my business – both for me and my clients. So I focus on keeping my own costs low and skipping out on costly amenities. In fact, I use priceline.com so much that William Shatner once dropped by my office just to give me a high five (ok, that’s not true, but actually I had a dream that he did).

Of all my travel expenses, I’m consistently satisfied with the value I get for flying Southwest Airlines. I’m sure you can guess why – relentless pursuit of low costs, highly efficient boarding and superior customer service. It’s this last point – superior customer service – that has me most amazed. If you were planning an airline business, would you imagine that combining low costs and superior customer service would be sustainable? I wouldn’t. How would you do it? While flipping through the SWA magazine before take off today I think I stumbled on a secret ingredient that any of us could add to our business and it costs almost nothing. It is simple and effective. Are you ready?

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What’s In It For Me? The Root Causes of Low CRM Adoption

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published by sfcg on June 8, 2011 - 6:13pm

In the past two weeks, I came across two perspectives on CRM that I’ve been thinking about a great deal.  Do either of these scenarios sound familiar?

  1. My father-in-law is a highly regarded, long time sales professional and master of his craft.  He has “retired” now, but one of his favorite hobbies is leading productive, high-end sales training courses.  During one of our recent talks he told me, “When I talk to the sales executives of any major company and the conversation turns to CRM, boy, no one is ever happy. In fact, they usually hate it.”
     
  2. A prospective client of mine is a sharp, energetic IT director.  Last week he gave me a walkthrough of a CRM On Demand instance he configured himself. As he walked me through a wide range of very colorful dashboards, charts and graphs, I was impressed with his skills in business intelligence and reporting. There was just one problem, “No matter what I do to this system, adoption is still a major issue. Why won’t they use it?”

Maybe it’s just me, but in my experience, these two scenarios – ironically from two people who have never met each other before – embody two sides of a coin.  Sales people (even sales managers) are rarely satisfied with their CRM system.  IT people are frequently frustrated that no one uses the systems they deliver.  The result is reduced adoption and low morale.

Three CRM Reports I Cannot Live Without

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published by sfcg on May 24, 2011 - 1:37am

When I have the opportunity to work with great people, I end up learning more from them than they do from me.  Having consulted for over 250 different companies in my career, I’ve had the opportunity to witness just about every management style imaginable – some excellent, others not so much.  Each time I work with someone excellent, I try to emulate those characteristics.  It's a hobby of mine to find a common thread amongst all of them.  Here is what I’ve come up with so far:

There is no substitute for organization.

Running a High Performance Sales Meeting

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published by sfcg on May 5, 2011 - 8:16pm

Is there anything more painful than the weekly team sales meeting?  You know, the one where each sales person reports in turn the activities they’ve completed account-by-account.  I’ve noticed a few things that every one of these meetings have in common.

  1. Boring - They are extremely boring. No one ever looks forward to the weekly sales meeting.
  2. Rambling - Everyone feels like they have to “prove” that they are working so each person in turn takes the maximum amount of time to talk about all the things going on in each account. Often they recycle the same information as last meeting.
  3. Zero Impact - When the meeting is over, no one does anything differently than they did before.
  4. Ironic - As painful as these meetings are, it seems all good sales organizations conduct these meetings.

At SFCG we always consider the cost of sales time to be very dear.  That one hour meeting is 2.5% of a standard work week.  So that weekly sales meeting drops the effective selling time of a 40 person sales team by one full person.  If it runs long (i.e. two hours) the effective selling force drops to 38 people.And yet, it seems like the height of management by abdication not to conduct a weekly review.

Why?

So, What is a Lead, Exactly?

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published by sfcg on March 20, 2011 - 3:00pm

 

You remember meeting Mike, don’t you? 

It was during your first week as a person with the company.  You were thrown onto the trade show floor. Your mission:  Find and engage prospects.  On the first hour of the first day, Mike marched right up to you.  He asked about the new product.  Mike was serious and he cast that air of being slightly impatient. You took a deep breath and began the delicate give and take dance between qualifying and providing information.  Mike stayed determined and hard to read.  By his questions you knew he was an expert. So you just stood your ground and held on, answering questions and doing your best to engage him with questions of your own.  Just as quickly as Mike appeared he dashed off.  At the last minute you regained your senses and had the presence of mind to ask him for a business hard. He turned and a crisp white card appeared between two fingers. 

“Is that my first lead?” you wondered with a small uncertain thrill.