Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

When do we find time to have strategy sessions? With teleconferences and Web meetings, it is easier now than ever before. Strategy sessions are a labor-saving device. The time saved by not selling to the wrong accounts, not selling to the wrong people, and not doing the wrong action items to win will more than pay for the time investment. The return on time invested in strategy sessions is anywhere from 2:1 to 10:1.

We’ve turned millions of dollars worth of deals around in strategy sessions with our clients and have seen them work. But it has to be a matter of discipline. Lexmark does it every Monday. Some companies have strategy sessions at each change of phase in the forecast. Other companies simply say, “No review, no resources.” If it’s not worth 30 minutes of your time to review the strategy with the team, why is it worth 15 hours of their time to travel across the country and look unprofessional?

The main reason that salespeople should have a strategy session is because they want to win and will have a better plan and a more committed team if they have invested the time to lead.

Enemies of Teamwork

For some companies, the biggest barrier to success is themselves. Their culture and values are so rotten inside that when you leave their building, you just want to take a shower. They can’t partner with anyone else because they can’t partner with themselves.

If this is your prospect, you should seriously consider whether the company is worth your time in the end. If there is a project involved, it probably won’t be successful. If it is the company you work for, you probably won’t be successful. Leave. Fast!

It’s not worth the money.

These are the activities that are the sand in the gears of a successful team. They destroy trust. Use the preceding list to evaluate your own company's team behavior. Use it to evaluate your customers to see if you really want to sell to them. Then evaluate yourself to see if you have engaged in any of these activities. The best salespeople build strong teams inside their own organizations to get things done for their customers.

While there have been some successes, customer relationship management (CRM), as it has been executed, has become one of the biggest misnomers in the business world.

It hasn’t been about customers, it hasn’t been about relationships, and it hasn’t been about management. In fact, when done poorly, CRM can serve as a barrier between you and your best clients. In reality, CRM has been about cost reduction, and the net effect has been to commoditize relationships by allowing customers to have a “personal” relationship with a computer.

In my personal life, I have fired four vendors who implemented CRM systems badly: my landscape chemical company, a florist, my home alarm company, and several banks. (In fact, I was bank-free for over 15 years. I moved everything to an online brokerage account.)

My landscape chemical company was the first to go. I have been blessed to own 12 acres, just north of Atlanta. Although I have a large yard, I represented only one account to this particular company. Different zones in my yard require different care, and because the company didn’t have mapping capabilities, its system had only one description for my yard. On top of that, every time they changed drivers, we had to start all over because their system did not provide continuity of information, which is one of the primary purposes of a CRM system.

The next to go was my florist. Several years ago we had a personal tragedy in our family and I needed five flower arrangements on a Friday, the beginning of a holiday weekend, for a funeral on Saturday. I called my usual florist and explained the situation. I told the salesperson that I would be right over (the store was only a few blocks away). When I got there, the store was closed. I got on my cell phone again and called the salesperson back.

“I am standing outside your door, and it doesn’t look like anyone is inside,” I said.

There was a long pause.

“Can I please speak to a manager?” I asked.

Another long pause.

“Where are you?” I demanded.

“In Denver,” she said.

When I asked her why she didn’t tell me this when I first called, she explained that the shop had recently been acquired by a larger company, and all the records had been moved over to a new system.

I canceled my order and called a local florist, Nature’s Rainbow, who already had my preferences and credit card on file. The salesperson told me that he would have five flower arrangements ready the next day, and that he would work as long as it took to get them done. Guess who had my business from then on?

My home alarm company was next. A few years ago, my house was struck by lightning, and it knocked out my alarm system. I called the 800 number to ask the company for help. The person on the other end was polite enough, but I soon realized that she was in Salt Lake City. My records, she told me, were in Kansas City — again because of a merger, which happens often in this industry.

I was incredulous. This was the number my wife was supposed to call if there was a burglary attempt while I was out of town! Now I deal with a local company, and my representative is good ole’ Alan. The last time I called him with a problem, he said, “Oh, yeah—that’s the switch over by the window. It’s always been a problem. I’ll stop by on my way home tonight.”

Give me high touch over high tech.

Bankers. Where do I start? I have a credit card from a bank that is now one of the largest in the United States. They were nice enough to give it to me when I graduated from college and had no money (this is either a great investment in me or terrible credit checking, but I’m glad to have the card). I’ve kept it for 32 years. Today, when I put that card into an ATM machine, the very first question the machine asks me is what language I speak. Thirty-two years and they don’t even know which language I speak? How is that for customer intimacy?

When I go in and speak to a teller face-to-face, the first thing he asks me is if I have photo identification. For 20 years in Atlanta I couldn’t get a banker to learn my name. I was running a large region for a major software company where we had a new hire almost every other week. I could have brought in a lot of nice accounts. But not once did I ever have a branch banker come out of his cave in the back to learn my name.

Much less, not one of those bankers — until this year — learned my business and provided advice on how to run it. Finally, I found a banker I like: Jim Pope of Ironstone Bank. He knows me, has invited me to play golf, and checks on me to ask about my business and my needs. I actually walked into the bank building a few weeks ago and was greeted across the lobby by Caren Lightfoot from behind the teller window. I asked to see one of the executives, but when she learned what my issue was (a deposit and a check written at the same time), she handled it herself. She said, “I know your relationship with the bank and what other funds you have. We’ll be fine.” I never thought it would happen in my lifetime. Access to information made it possible, but a caring person made it happen.

When I need something or know that someone is looking for a good banker, I have somebody to call. This is why small banks are booming. When it comes to relationships, they are actually doing what the big banks say they do in their ads. My insurance agent is next. He thinks a relationship is sending calendars and refrigerator magnets once a year.

“Please wait while our agents are servicing other customers” often means “We haven’t hired enough people to take care of our clients, so you have to wait.”

The reason many CRM systems have been implemented poorly is that their objective has been a lie. It was never about customers or relationships in the first place.

The true objective when it comes to many of these systems is lowering costs. The idea is that if you can move a customer to a call center from a sales call, your cost drops from $200 to around $25. Even better, if you can move the customer out of the call center and onto the Web, it drops to about 17 cents. Lowering costs in this age of the “China effect”—the epidemic of cost containment — means that in some cases companies have become more efficient at providing Internet or call-center service for very low margin accounts.

But the disease has spread over to large-margin relationships where companies are treating their best business customers like commodities, making them wait in long hold lines. “Please wait while our agents are servicing other customers” often means “We haven’t hired enough people to take care of our clients, so you have to wait.”

The next objective of the CRM system has been to get the “little black book” out of the heads of salespeople and into the computer so that, if and when the salespeople leave, they don’t take their names and contacts with them. In reality, if they have built relationships with these contacts, they still take the relationships with them.