Why Removing a Customer’s Current Pain Is Not Enough

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Experienced sales people know that their primary task is to identify and resolve a customer’s need.  Look for pain points and propose solutions to remove the pain. Customers know this too which is why they often want to shortcut the selling process by quickly categorizing your proposal and focusing on the price for pain removal.  How you react defines how seriously the customer will consider your proposal.  This is the decisive moment.  How will you …

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3 Steps for Customer-Partnering with Distributors

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If you rely on distributors to get your products to market, then your core challenge is managing your relationship to maximize your mutual benefit. The distributor is not your employee, but you must ensure that the integrity of your value proposition is sustained as if the distributor worked directly for you. The distributor is not your end customer, but you must help achieve the distributor’s and end user’s goals. Your distributor relationship is ideal for customer-partnering. The most …

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3 Ways to Strengthen Leadership Engagement

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Your people are your most sustainable competitive advantage. When they robustly and consistently demonstrate your company’s core Principles, they create experiences for your customers that cultivate enduring relationships. In addition, research confirms the direct linkage between high company performance and high employee engagement. Engagement infuses your company’s actions with vitality, strengthens your competitive advantage, and focuses energy to grow your business. It requires a consistent investment of your time and a regular infusion of new ideas to fuel your people’s …

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Assessing the Value of “Free”

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Everyone can be seduced by a zero price.  But those who react most eagerly to the word “free” rarely pause to consider the value of your offering.  Could they become customers who actually invest in your product or service? People reacting to a zero price rarely stop to consider if the offer is worth it.  Because they don’t assess the value of your free offer, they will never be your customer.  So why invest your precious resources …

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Is Trust The Most Vital Ingredient of Relationships?

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What’s the most vital ingredient of enduring relationships? Your first instinct might be to answer that trust is the most essential ingredient. But in today’s “connection” economy, there’s an even more primal element that enables trust and benefits everyone in the relationship. Before trust can grow, there must be generosity. Generosity creates trust. Generosity is more than offering discounts or giving products or services away for free. If we don’t know you, why would we invest valuable time …

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Is Your Busyness Sabotaging Your Business?

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The daily demands on your time – meetings, email, personnel management, etc. – can distract you and destroy your plans for a productive day. Before you know it, there is little time for the proactive tasks you had planned to pursue like following up with customers and collaborators, asking for referrals, reviewing your key performance indicators, goal setting and planning. Time management is a challenge for every business leader. Filling your day with “busyness” instead of …

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Are You Genuine?

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When you’re looking for the next order, it’s easy to slip into a small exaggeration to attract attention.  “Our Service Plan covers everything.” “Our price is always lower than the competition.” “We always exceed your expectations.” These half-truths destroy your credibility and alert the prospect that you may not be trustworthy. Use these tips to make your selling efforts more genuine: Have Positive Expectations Positive behavior often inspires positive responses.  People tend to mirror each other’s …

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Why Do Good People Fall Short?

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Perhaps they lack the required experience, confidence or competence.  Perhaps their goals are unclear.  But often, it’s the behavior of the employee’s leader that is the primary cause for constraining an employee’s performance. When a leader acts differently than the employee expected – neither being nor doing what they believe is appropriate – then the employee is likely to get discouraged and fail to meet his or her potential. Leaders don’t do this on purpose, …

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Restoring the Personal Touch

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In business, technology is the indispensable enabler of communications, customer service, productivity and other functions.  You cannot compete without it. But people want to do business with other people, not with faceless companies or their technology.  If technology identifies a new opportunity, how can you transform it into a personal interaction? Years ago, our parents and grandparents knew the people that sold them their food, hardware, shoes, etc. and B-to-B transactions were conducted across a …

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You Can’t Cause Change With A Memo

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Change is inevitable. Organizations are always adapting to meet shifting market conditions, to enable their growth, etc. Resistance to change is also inevitable.  It takes more than a memo containing a few bullet points to overcome this resistance. What seems crystal clear to you regarding a pending change initiative is often less straightforward for those impacted by the change. Expect it to take much longer than you imagined to implement a major change. Plan your …

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