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Tom Reilly Training Home of Value-Added Selling and Coaching for Sales Success |
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Whose Customer? Our Customer! by Tom Reilly I recently spoke to a management group in New York on Value Added Teamwork and one of the participants, a production supervisor, said to me, “Tom, don’t you think salespeople should get away from saying my customer? After all, isn’t it our customer.” He voiced a concern for many “inside” people: that salespeople become so territorial with customers that they lose sight of whose customer it is. It’s not yours or mine—it’s our customer! This echoes the trend we see in today’s business climate. Back-to-back cover stories in Business Week magazine discuss the popularity of the team approach in sales and a general trend toward work groups as a way to combat inefficiency. The explosion of TQM seminars promoting teamwork heralds a new attitude in business: “We is a lot stronger than me!” Companies are becoming painfully aware that customer retention is a major survival issue and teamwork helps. It costs the average company five to six times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one happy. A two percent reduction in a company’s customer attrition rate has the same effect on profitability as a ten percent cost reduction program. And, it takes an average of seven calls for a salesperson to close a new account versus three calls to close an existing customer. Nailing the back door shut is an absolute necessity these days. Keeping these customers happy is a function of exceeding their expectations. Companies understand this. They are redefining customer service as a mindset not a department. Suddenly, it’s becoming everyone’s responsibility to create satisfied customers. They achieve this by “unfreezing” cultural paradigms about who is a customer and who is accountable for customer satisfaction. The premise is simple. Everyone in the organization has a customer—either internal or external. External customers are the more traditional types: end users or consumers of a product. Internal customers are those whom you serve inside the company. These service-minded companies have also discovered two corollaries of customer service. First, everything you do to serve your internal customer has an outward rippling effect on your external customer. Second, you can only serve your external customer to the degree to which you serve your internal customer. So what do we have? Team members not only working in concert to satisfy the traditional customer; but team members working together to serve other team members—“We is a lot stronger than me.” Imagine what it would be like to work for an organization where everyone treated each other with the respect normally due an external customer? Imagine what it would be like to work for a boss who viewed his employees as internal customers? Imagine what it would be like to purchase from a company where everyone had the same goal of exceeding their customer’s expectations? “We” is contagious. Everyone wants to belong to something. Employees who mentally join the team are the greatest standard bearers for an organization. Customers who join the team are the greatest marketers for the organization. As companies look for ways to compete in tight markets and through economic times, they are well-advised to use one of their most powerful resources—their team. Tom Reilly is the author of twelve books, including: Value-Added Selling, Coaching for Sales Success, Customer Service Is More Than a Department, The Young Eagle, Get Out of the Wagon and Help Me Pull This Thing, and Crush Price Objections. For more information contact: Tom Reilly Training, 171 Chesterfield Industrial Boulevard, Chesterfield, MO 63005 (636)537-3360 www.TomReillyTraining.com |
TOM REILLY TRAINING 171 Chesterfield Industrial Boulevard, Chesterfield Missouri 63005 636-537-3360 www.TomReillyTraining.com ©2008 Tom Reilly Training |