6 Requirements For Properly Breaking In A New Customer
The customer you start with is the customer you end up with. We have to establish rules, boundaries and limitations with our new customers immediately after consummation of the relationship. Like spoiled and ill-behaved teenagers, if we don’t follow common sense “parenting” principles right from the start, it’s hard to cure customer problems later.
Areas Where We Go Wrong
Here is where I see sales professionals get in trouble right from the outset with virginal customers:
1. Pricing. Train your new customers about your pricing; you aren’t the cheapest in town. You probably never will be, and there’s a reason. If price is their only concern, they need to look elsewhere.
2. Payment. Instruct your baby customers on the fine art of paying their bills. Let them know right from the first order that you are not intending to finance their business with your accounts receivable – and lost commissions.
3. Products. Educate your customers early on about your broad line of products and services. Let them know you intend to fill all of their needs with your products and services and won’t tolerate cherry picking.
4. Decision Makers. Help your newborn customers learn that you will be contacting decision makers at all levels of their company. Dealing with just the purchasing department won’t work for you.
5. Communication. By example, teach your newbie customers that you will return emails and voice mails within 60 minutes. You expect them to respond quickly to you as well.
6. Relationship. It’s impressive that one of the decision makers you’ll be working with at your newfound customer is a manager/director/VP/president/CXO/Intergalactic Lord of Nations/etc. However, you don’t really care about titles when it comes to how they treat you personally. You’ll treat them with respect, but you expect complete reciprocity in this regard. Can we say boundaries?
The Dance
When we initiate a relationship with a new customer, we begin a dance. A more sterile description would be to say that we are testing one another. A little push here. A little give there.
Sales Blog Epilogue
Confidence, authenticity and assertiveness will “break in” those fresh customers in all the right ways. If you let them grow up to be a teenager with a handful of bad habits and attitudes, it will be difficult to fix the issues down the road.
The customer you start with is the customer you end up with.
Further reading:
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Related posts:
- Training Your Customer, Part 1 of 2
- Customer Price Sensitivity
- Does any customer at any time ever pay the lowest price for anything?
- Customer Negotiation Tactics – More Bark Than Bite
- You May Be Blind To This Customer Negotiating Tactic
Tags: assertive, cross-selling, customers, pricing
We'd like to hear your feedback on this post - feel free to comment below!
October 20th, 2009 at 7:30 am
Scott – this is a great reminder of the basics. You can’t expect more respect from your customers than you have for yourself.
These are also useful tools to be used internally (#4-6). If you are new to an organization, communicate your expectations upfront, after you’ve communicated how your colleagues can rely on you to deliver your part.
October 20th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Thank you for your comments Melanie. Good point about using some of these points within your organization.
Scott Sheaffer