What are you like? Are you pleasant? Are you responsive? Are you fair? Do you demonstrate that you care about helping people with whatever solution you provide? Do you give your customers a reason to be glad that they do business with you? Would you buy from you?
Here's the thing: business culture today is so focused on the target/goal/objective, that the means of achieving those ends — the how of business — is often an afterthought. In fact, sometimes the how is not thought of at all, and so becomes utterly subjugated, sacrificed, and snuffed out in relentless — and arguably obsessive — pursuit of exclusively measurable outcomes and the bottom line. The how becomes nothing but a necessary evil standing between you and the why. And like all necessary evils, you treat it with resistance, contempt, and disdain (have you experienced life at the DMV lately?).
I'm not saying that every single customer that you meet should receive flowers or a ticker-tape parade ("Hooray! You're our 9th customer today!"). I'm saying that the how of your business is as essential as the why. The how matters. It's important. Your customers deserve more how from you. And if they get a taste of it from your competitors, they'll come to expect it from you, too. If you don't have the how of your business in shape, you'll lose them. And who can you blame for this other than yourself, and your anti-howism?
So, what can you do to inject some high-quality "how" into your business? It's easier than you think. Simply start here:
- Don't act like you're doing your customer a favor by selling to them. Guard against this especially if, right now, you're very busy and your product is in high demand. Business is a cycle; you'll come down to earth sooner or later, and the trail of pissed-off prospects in your wake won't care to help you get back up.
- Don't ever confuse soft-selling with that ugly creature called "anti-marketing"; the former is an authentic and empowering way to develop a relationship with a prospect, while the latter is an invention of miserable, self-absorbed people who should be in deep, multi-discipline therapy.
- Focus on two fundamental aspects of customer happiness: their happiness with the sales process, and their happiness with the solution that they buy from you. When people engage in word of mouth marketing, they often emphasize the how of the sale more than the why or the what.
- Remember your customer's name! Don't be afraid to ask for it if you happen to forget. Nothing is worse than getting a name wrong. It's sloppy, and if you can remember your own name, you can remember someone else's.
- Make sure that your colleagues around you support your efforts to develop a pleasant, quality sales experience. Don't have Sarah from shipping or Joe from accounting running around madly waving a waybill in the air while you're trying to talk to a prospect about your "total commitment to customer service."
Start with these, and build a "how" consciousness into your business. You'll soon see for yourself that a better how leads to a better everything else, including a better bottom line.
About the Author
Adrian Miller is a speaker, a consultant, and president of Adrian Miller Sales Training. Her firm works nationwide, providing highly customized sales training solutions and business development consulting to companies across a wide diversity of industries. Adrian works with companies that range in size from solopreneurs to Fortune 500 firms, and her high-energy programs are well known to be practical, informative, results driven, and fun. Widely read in business publications, Adrian is also the author of The Blatant Truth: 50 Ways to Sales Success, and she is currently at work on her next book. She can be reached at 516-767-9288 or amiller@adrianmiller.com.
