Sales Blog with Sales Tips

When I was just a sales pup I received one of the best sales tips I’ve ever heard. It was from my sales manager.

The advice I got was, “Keep in touch with your customers when they are laid off; they always reappear somewhere else.”

Why This Is Especially Important Right Now
We’re heading out of the recession, but the unemployment rate is a high 10%. About 4% of this 10% represents those who are not looking for work or chronically unemployed. This leaves us with a net real unemployment rate of approximately 6%.

What does this mean? One out of 17 of your customers has been laid off and is looking for work. That’s a lot. This percentage will vary according to the industries represented in your customer mix.

That 6% represents a tremendous sales – and helping – opportunity for you.

Staying In Touch
There are a number of reasons to keep in contact with your unemployed ex-customers.

• Most importantly, it’s the right thing to do. People feel abandoned and forgotten when unemployed. It doesn’t matter whether you think you’ll ever sell to them again or not. This is an issue of being human. The karma thing.

• 99% of the time, these ex-customers will end up in the same industry and same job they came from. They’ll want to do business with you because you’re a known and trusted person. Keeping in contact during stormy times keeps the bond intact.

• As ex-customers look for employment, you can help them by providing job leads. Think of the goodwill this creates. They will also be in a position to share information with you about companies they are interviewing with (i.e. sales leads).

Sales Tips For How To Keep In Touch
Here’s a short checklist on how to keep in touch with these temporarily unemployed ex-customers.

• If you’ve lost touch with them, you can search for them on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Do a little research so you’ll know something about their current situation before contacting them.

• Contact them by email and/or phone at least every 2 to 3 weeks to see how they are doing. Be sure to mention any job openings that might fit what they’re looking for. They welcome the moral support provided at a time like this.

• Listen to them. What was true when they were active buying customers is true while they are unemployed. Listen to their needs; you’ll be in a better position to help them.

A Final Note
Don’t do this primarily as an exercise to get them back as a customer. Do this in order to support people who have helped you in the past (i.e. by buying from you). When they land on their feet – and they will – they’ll likely contact you and business can resume again.

If they aren’t able to, or choose not to, do business with you after finding a new job, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you helped someone. That has a way of drawing all kinds of good things your direction.

Further sales blog reading:
A Reader Asks About Sales Force Layoffs
These Two Words are Killing Your Sales
Direct Sales Tips: What the media types do to ruin your sales career.

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Scott Sheaffer’s New Book, “Comatose Management”
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Six Short Stories of Destructive Management Practices, Volume I
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Available in printed and Kindle edition on amazon.com
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We all have customers that are a pain in the tail end. It’s part of being a sales professional. However, there is a class of customers that goes beyond annoying. I’m talking about the kind that stalk you, cause stress and can even be scary to deal with.

I call these Crazy Pill Customers (CPCs).

We’ve all had them.

10 Common Attributes Of A CPC

1. They suck time out of you like a vampire sucks blood.
2. You are never able to provide  enough help for them.
3. They don’t listen to good advice.
4. They want you to believe every one of your competitors is gunning for their business.
5. “Free” would not be cheap enough for them; their purchases are small and they pay slowly.
6. They escalate every problem to your boss, your boss’s boss…
7. Every sale you make to them has a problem and it’s always your fault.
8. Their need for additional information is unending and knows no boundaries.
9. They are bipolar; you’re either a demon or an angel depending on their mood.
10. Everyone who works at that company is unhappy and not fun to work with.

Sales Tips For Handling Crazy Pill Customers
No one can tell you how to handle your accounts. However, if you have a handful of customers that have a majority of the ten attributes above, fire them! They’re a ball and chain.

Why They Need To Go
It’s an irony in sales that we frequently spend the majority of our time on high maintenance, low volume customers. I think the reason for this is that our best customers are cooperative, understanding and professional. They’re sane.

Over time CPC customers tend to orbit closer to us while our best customers orbit much farther out, getting less of our attention. Losing the CPCs frees us to spend time on the accounts that butter our bread and gives us time to find new ones that will do the same.

It Isn’t Easy
It’s hard to walk away from CPC’s because of the immediate revenue they may provide, albeit small. By jettisoning them, you will regain your sanity, free up time to find new quality business and build a stronger bridge with the customers that aren’t taking crazy pills.

Further reading:

• Bad Accounts are Like Weeds
• Fire a Customer for Fun and Profit

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©2009 Scott R. Sheaffer

There is a truth in the buyer-seller relationship that is rarely revealed by the buyer and frequently goes unseen by the seller. The recognition of this truth will cause us to worry less about losing customers. It will also give us more confidence when pricing.

First, A Couple Of Notes
Before we dive deeper into this topic, I want to quickly mention two unrelated items:

1. I’d like to give a big thank you to all of the regular readers of this sales blog. Your feedback is motivating, educational and inspiring.
2. If you are getting these sales tips by going directly to the blog website, take a few seconds to sign up and get new posts sent to you by email or RSS. Go to the bottom of this post to see how.

Now, Where Were We?
There is a secret that buyers will seldom confess to us. It has to do with personal value or human capital that we bring to the buyer-seller relationship. I learned about this classified information on an occasion when I fired a high maintenance, slow paying, low volume, no profit customer. You know the type.

You’re Fired
I fired this customer by using a “dull pencil.” Using a “dull pencil” simply means the opposite of using a “sharp pencil.” I increased their pricing, hoping they would jump ship – my ship. They complained, but didn’t quit buying from me. I increased their pricing again; they kept buying. I increased their pricing a third time. You guessed right. They continued to order from me.

I finally had to call them and kindly ask them to buy from one of our competitors – please. I even suggested a competitor.

A Light Bulb Goes On
I hung up from that phone call and asked myself, what is going on here? I concluded that they hated the idea of having to source and qualify another supplier. The pain of finding a replacement supplier was greater than the pain of my increasing prices. Buyers generally dislike finding a new supplier when the one they have is working just fine.

Finding a new supplier is not easy or simple. They would have to interview suppliers, establish credit, start a new relationship from scratch and train the new sales professional on their purchasing department’s paperwork gymnastics.

This was not going to be easy or fun for them. They would have to exert themselves.

Truth Revealed
It is costly and time consuming for companies to change suppliers. Especially strategic suppliers.

As sales professionals, we often perceive that we are on the brink of losing all of our customers. Not true. Our customers are much stickier than we think. We don’t need to worry about customer attrition nearly as much as we are inclined to. We can also charge higher prices to many of our customers because they know the costs of changing vendors.

It’s their little secret.

Further reading:

• Bad Accounts are Like Weeds
• One of My Most Startling Sales Tips [Why and how to get rid of bad customers]

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Imagine for a moment that your bad accounts are like weeds. Don’t feel bad. We all have weeds.

First Let’s Define “Bad Accounts”
What do I mean by “bad accounts?”

• Low sales
• High maintenance
• Low margins
• Low to no commission
• Chronically past due on payments
• Unlimited appetite for your time
• No growth potential

You know what I’m talking about here. We’ve discussed this concept before in this sales blog.

“We become a prisoner of these junk customers.”

Sales Tips for Bad Accounts
The problem with lousy accounts is that they impede our ability to properly tend to our good accounts and find new high quality accounts.

• Weeds can become so dominant in a garden that they hide desirable plants. Bad accounts do the same thing to us. These inferior accounts become so prominent that we can’t see great opportunities sitting right in front of us.
• Weeds suck the nourishment out of the soil in a garden, leaving less for the plants we want to cultivate. We all have a limited amount of energy and time. It’s not smart to squander it on poor quality customers.
• In a crowded garden both the foliage of weeds and choice plants tend to look the same. If we let the weeds in a garden get out of control, it can become impossible to get rid of them without damaging or killing the plants we want to nurture. We lose our ability to differentiate accurately between good and bad. When we are mired down with a bunch of bottom-rung customers we can find ourselves dependent on the meager commission and revenues they bring us while simultaneously not leaving us the time and resources to replace them. We become a prisoner of these junk customers.

Sales Blog Wrap-Up
I know it’s hard to weed your garden. Revenue is revenue regardless of the source, you say. However, not all revenue is equal. We have to balance our time against the ROI (Return on Investment) for all of our accounts.

See “Further reading” below to find out how to eliminate those accounts that are genuine weeds and are squeezing you out of future sales opportunities.

Further reading:

• One of My Most Startling Sales Tips
• Fire a Customer for Fun and Profit

To receive this sales tips blog by email <click here> to receive by RSS <click here>. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer