Coach for Customer Interaction Excellence

Lessons Learned On the Way

It is often pointed out that salespeople always provide value from the customer's perspective. Successful sellers position benefits to fit needs. The best are different from the rest because they are sales and service driven. They create win-win outcomes for customers, their organizations, and themselves. They sell profitable solutions customers need and want. These attributes are not clichés. They are sales success absolutes. The problem is significant numbers of salespeople do not meet this success profile. It seems obvious that getting more salespeople to provide outstanding performance during customer meetings is a path to competitive differentiation. This leads us to ponder - why don't more organizations establish and maintain customer interaction excellence in the majority of their salespeople?

Business Efficacy believes the answer is basic. Our field-based experience indicates only a small number of sales managers do the critical things required to develop and maintain customer interaction excellence in all their people. Gaining competitive advantage is a must and the sales force has to be a prime source of this advantage. Sales management's job is to develop customer interaction excellence in every salesperson. Yes - hiring the right people is a key strategy to accomplish this. However, that is never enough. Competitive markets and customer choice make salesperson-client interactions a dynamic variable. Performance excellence is dependent on the constant and consistent development of each salesperson, including high performers.

Sales management must continuously create, foster, monitor, drive, and participate in the development of customer meeting effectiveness. If sales managers did a better job of managing this performance dimension, they would see dramatic sales growth in the majority of their salespeople. A high potential salesperson told us the other day that she never gets to discuss with her manager how her customer calls could be improved. All that is discussed between her and her manager is the expected sales numbers. She wants to be her best, yet believes she is not getting enough help from her manager to become that. This salesperson is currently looking for another job.

Here are a few things that every sales manager can do to drive a salesperson to customer interface excellence. None of these actions are new - they are fundamental. The key is to do all of them well and often - do these common things uncommonly well.

1. Set clear expectations of customer meeting performance excellence. Be clear about the quantity of customers that need to be seen daily. Establish which customers need to be seen frequently and why. Communicate what excellent customer interactions look like and how they are done. Be descriptive and precise. Lastly, define what sales outcomes are expected when customer contact excellence is delivered.
2. Increase the frequency of joint sales calls. Observe what is happening between customers and salespeople - watch versus sell. Sales reports do not show what customers experience. All too often customer call performance is assumed from sales reports. The demands of e-mail, management meetings, market analysis, and other company requirements make it hard to do enough field-based sales coaching. Yet, there is no better way to know what is happening than being there. Seeing the customer experience is a coaching effectiveness must. It has to be a priority.
3. Debrief sales calls. Ask salespeople to replay the call. Ask questions about how the objectives of sales excellence were accomplished. Good responses indicate progress is happening. A lack of relevant information indicates a development opportunity exists. This can be done by phone, face-to-face, or even by e-mail. A sales manager can never debrief too many sales calls.
4. Conduct pre-call planning. Have discussions with salespeople about what they want to accomplish on a call. Find out how the goal of providing sales excellence is going to be done. Effective pre-call planning is an in-depth conversation of how a sales call will be done, not just a discussion of what plans to be sold.
5. Have lost business reviews. A discussion about what happened to cause a customer to say no is an excellent way to explore how additional value could have been created throughout the sales process. This discussion often develops salespeople into a mindset of how things can be done differently in order to ensure future success.
6. Review every sale that was won. Discuss what worked and why. Reinforce the value the customer experienced. Talk about how that success can be repeated in other pending business opportunities. Most of all celebrate success. Winning breeds winning if the seeds of performance are sowed appropriately and often.

Recently Business Efficacy was privy to a discussion between three executives about their dissatisfaction with sales force performance. Issues of poor margins, customer attrition, collectables, and win-lose solutions were discussed passionately. When they arrived at determining solutions, “been there, done that” ideas were presented. More training and adjusting incentive plans were proposed. We responded that approaches they were considering could be done and incremental improvement was possible, but return on investment was unlikely. We suggested the answer is getting their sales managers to drive improved performance during every customer interface. The executives originally considered our suggestion too basic to really make a difference. We responded by emphasizing execution of fundamentals is basic and essential. We asked, is anything more important than a high valued interaction between a customer and the primary representative of the organization, a salesperson? The answer was obvious. We reemphasized implementing sales coaching that matters most.

Here's a challenge to all of us in sales management – let's do that common thing uncommonly well. Everybody wins when we do.