Sales Strategy

Invest in customer satisfaction and they’ll invest more in you. 

Customer satisfaction is critical to repeat and referral business, so experienced salespeople proactively manage customer satisfaction and follow-up on their service delivery to ensure that every customer is pleased with service delivered.

No one can afford to lose customers in this tough economy.  The rule of thumb is that it can be up to four times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to satisfy the ones you already have.  The three rules for ensuring customer satisfaction are plan your work, work your plan, and follow up diligently.

Plan your work – clearly establish expectations with each customer for what you need to accomplish to satisfy them.  This can include the outcomes as well as the steps to achieve the outcomes, and always includes the customer’s point of view.  Make sure everyone on your team as well as the customer’s team knows what the expectations are.

Work your plan – set your team up for a successful delivery that meets customer expectations.  Ensure that appropriate resources are in place every step of the way, and over-communicate with everyone involved.  Be sure to give your team the authority to do whatever is reasonable to meet the customer’s established expectations – even if this means cutting the margins on a particular order.  Things can go wrong, and your team needs to know that if they do, your company should take the hit, not your customer.

Follow up with every customer.  Their satisfaction is defined by them only – if your team did everything they thought was needed, but the customer still wasn’t satisfied, you missed the mark.  Follow up with every delivery so your customer and your team know you are paying close attention.

Here are a couple of tips for ensuring your customers are satisfied with your delivery:

• Many times customers are dissatisfied because they had unrealistic expectations that you never had a chance to meet.  Take responsibility for managing your customer’s expectations – communicate early, communicate clearly, and communicate often.
• Sometimes problems occur because customer expectations aren’t clearly communicated to the people delivering the product or service.  Establish simple methods to document customer expectations in ways that the delivery team can understand.
• Don’t fall into the trap of only following up with customers when it appears something has gone wrong.  Follow up with every customer, even when you know they are satisfied.  Just the act of their acknowledging that they are happy with your product or service makes it more likely they will do additional business with you or refer your company to others.
• Share positive feedback with your team.  A great way to keep them motivated is to spread good news when you have a happy customer.