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Warren Wechsler's
Top Story

Customer Care

Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Some restrictions apply to the use and distribution of this information. For more valuable materials, visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com. All materials and content © Warren Wechsler, 2001 – All rights reserved.

We are going to talk about customers today. Customers are the lifeblood of anyone's business. Customers are the lifeblood of everybody's business. They pay our salaries. They help us succeed. When they buy from us they validate everything that we stand for. I want to focus on the customer today.

What's the best way to take care of our customers? What do you think, what do we all think, what do I think about what are the best ways to take care of our customers? I conducted a survey in 1991, again in 1994, and again in 1997. I asked customers, "What do you want from your provider of choice? What would be that number one attribute?"

Ninety-one percent of the people who responded to that survey said, "Be there when I need you." What this means is you don't have to have the fastest, you don't have to be the quickest, you don't have to be the cheapest, you don't have to be the smartest, but if you are there, if you show up as Woody Allen said…"80% of being successful in life is showing up," said Woody Allen. If you show up and you're there when your customers need you, that will lead you to success. It's not rocket science; it's very simple; it's common sense. So be there when your customer needs you.

What's another great way to take care of your customers? How about saying, "Thank you. Thank you for being my customer. Thanks for placing that order with me. Thanks for taking care of that service request. Thanks for making sure that that paperwork got out on time. Thanks for sending me that information. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." These are the two most underutilized words in any person's vocabulary in business or personal parts of our lives.

Think about all the things you've bought and how few times anybody has said, "Thank you. Thank you for being a customer. Thank you for buying a house through me. Thank you for placing your insurance through me. Thanks for advertising on my radio station." Thank you. Two wonderful, underutilized words that can help you endear yourself to your customers.

How about acting in the behavior appropriate with "be here when I need you", by adopting a philosophy that "I'm here for you". "You're my customer and I'm here for you. Here's my cell phone number. Here's my pager number. Here's a 24-hour toll-free number. Here's my web address so you can get information even when I am sleeping. If you're not sleeping, you can go to my website and you can get information about our products, our services, our solutions, the applications of our products."

How about that? How about having a philosophy that I'm here for you and living that every business day? How about making sure your customers know how to get a hold of you, making sure they know who else is on your team, and where they should turn when they have questions or problems or complaints? "Yes, customer, I'm here for you." It's a good advertising slogan.

Why is this so important? Why is this whole focus on the customer such an important aspect of the sales process? Let me tell you. The first step in the Six-Step model that I've created…Here comes my credibility piece, my credentials piece on the radio. I wrote a book in 1995 called The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling that became nationally recognized. In fact, the Los Angeles Times selected it as the best new sales book of the year in the year it came out.

The first step in The Six Steps to Excellence in Selling is called Find the Prospect. In other words, figure out whom you're going to talk to, whom are you going to call on, whom are you going to try to get appointments with, whom are you going to try to build your business with. The best prospect is our customer. Our best prospect is our customer. Why is that? Why is our customer our best prospect? I'm going to tell you.

A current customer is nine times more likely to buy something from you than the person who has never bought from you before. Your customer already likes you and trusts you. They have crossed the most important threshold that any prospect ever crosses when they decide to do business with you or your company or me or my company. That is they trust you and they like you.

The main reason to keep in touch with your current clients and focus on them as your best prospect is because you want to do your darndest to retain that business. The converse of it's nine times easier to have a current customer buy from you than go out and try to have a new person buy from you is that it's nine times more difficult to have a perfect stranger or someone who has not done business with you before do business with you now. A retention strategy therefore is the number one reason why you want to keep in touch with your current clients. In fact, if you look at most businesses, let's take a business that does $2,000,000 in sales in the year 2000. In the year 2001, probably 75-80% of that $2,000,000, up to $1,500,000 or $1,600,000 is going to be the repeat purchases of current customers.

Too many times in the sales business we ignore these customers in pursuit of the brand new prospect. In fact, somebody once told me a story, it's actually a radio story, about one of their top customers. They stopped doing business because they felt that they weren't being served or serviced by the sales professional that was calling on them. That sales professional was either sleeping in or hanging out in the movie theater or maybe just focused on new business and not taking care of the current customer. Heck, maybe they were drinking coffee all day for all we know. The fact is that customer decided to cut way back on what they were buying from this particular client not because the product was bad, not because the application of the product was bad, but only because the sales person stopped calling on them. Retention is that number one reason to take care of your customers.

The second reason is to introduce new ideas. Grow that business you're getting from your customers. On last week's show, we had Jay D. Willie talk from Hawkins Pharmaceuticals. He talked about how they keep going back to their same customers over and over and over again, introducing new ideas, finding new ways to be of service to current clients.

If any of us focused on this strategy, we could increase our business from 12-20%. I've documented it with my client base. If they started focusing on their customer base and introduced new ideas, new ways to be of service, what they found is that 85% of their current customers would at least listen to a new idea. The second reason, therefore, to really focus on the customer is for growth opportunities.

The third reason is that you can farm your customer base for referral business. You may ask your customers for referrals if they are happy, if they're satisfied. If you're doing a good job of servicing them, they will be delighted to give you referrals.

I've mentioned three specific reasons why our customers need our attention: for retention, for growth, and for referral business. Why don't we as a sales profession have a policy, have a philosophy that we have a way to keep in touch with our best clients? If you take your top 10% of your client base, if you have 500 active accounts, we're talking about 50 accounts, why don't you cut those from the other 450, and call them your high A's, or your top customers, or your chairmen's excellent circle group, or something like that, and make a determined effort to keep in touch with those people on a regular basis, whether it's once a month, once a week, once a quarter. Do something special for that top 10% of your customer base. Invite them to events, ask them out to breakfast, go to their facility and have tour, invite them to your facility and have a tour, take them to a Rotary meeting, take them to a ballgame, buy them some bagels and drop them off somewhere. Do whatever you can to nurture those top 10% of your clients because it will pay back in spades.

There's one final thing I want to talk about when it comes to your customer. We've talked about thanking them, we've talked about being there for them, we've talked about having a philosophy of "I'm here for you", and we've talked about the three best reasons to keep in touch with customers, those being retention, growth, and referrals. There's one other thing. Maybe the other theme in addition to "I'm here for you" ought to be "I'm responsible for you", meaning that if something goes wrong, the buck stops with me. Think about those ideas when you think about your customers. And it's not the customer about whom you feel, "Oh, if it weren't for those customers I could get my work done." You've heard that before. It's not true. If it weren't for those customers we'd be out of business.

This was a partial transcript from Warren Wechsler's weekly radio show. Warren Wechsler, bestselling author and national sales and motivational speaker, provides many valuable resources free of charge to sales trainers and sales managers. Visit Warren's web site www.totalselling.com Also, listen to Warren's weekly radio broadcast Wednesday's at 4:05 - 5:00 pm Central time, on KMCD-AM 1570AM. Shows are broadcast live on the internet at http://www.warpradio.com/asx/KMCD-AM.asx