Why now? by Michael Wolf

Because no one is buying anything in some markets, and in others they are buying a small fraction of what they were buying a short time ago. Business really stinks! And when business is this bad, companies cut back on expenses and even sales is impacted. Sales heads roll, and the remaining people are told not to spend any money, which means customer visits are replaced by phone calls and e mails. Well, guess what? Customers don't like being ignored, and while this is not what sales management intended, this is what is felt on the customer side.

Customers understand that sales people don't have the budgets now for the levels of entertaining and training that they previously had, and they don't expect that during these tough times. But they do expect their key suppliers to continue to visit them!

Having lived through the last 30 years of business cycles, my experience is that when the going gets tough, the best sales people get going - on customer calls. Many years ago I was selling capital equipment during a downturn, and I was able to convince my boss that we should experiment by making a road trip (versus an expensive plane trip) through New England and New York, visiting all of our customers and prospects "on the cheap". And to a person, they all appreciated my visits. Several told me "no one ever comes here anymore, except you, and we will remember it later when things pick up". And they did!

I have stayed in contact with many of these former customers over the years, and now we talk about going through the hard times and the good times, together. They still remember when I came to see them even though we both knew there was no possibility of getting an order.

Customer loyalty

With all of the price pressure these days, customer loyalty may seem to be a thing of the past, but I can assure you that the customers you stuck with during the tough times are more loyal than you think. Maybe not the purchasing types, who are measured on how much discount they were able to extract from you, but for sure the influencers and decision makers who have to use your product or service, and the technical groups whose specs you had to meet to win the business, and the marketing and sales people in your customer who were relying on you to deliver your product on time so they could deliver to their customers. MW

Customer Partnership, by Paula Madan

What happened when times were good? Did you really Hug them then? Do you remember how it felt?

I remember each time one of our customers felt hugged. There weren't many! When a customer feels hugged he looks at you with a thankful expression that is hard to forget. Those rare moments are the ones when you know that your job has meaning and you are indeed being valued.

We all do our best in finding the needs of our customers; we research and acquire the knowledge available about them in an attempt to get the "one insight" that reveals what they really need. After 20 years of experience I have realized that all of this is not enough. I have only been able to Hug when we went beyond the explicit knowledge available. When we were able to listen to the metaphors used by the customer in meetings, the tense body language at the mention of a certain word, the brightness of the eyes when an outline of the world they wanted to live in was somehow mentioned. It was in that moment when finally the emotional button was discovered and touched that we knew we had hugged each other. From that moment on, no product was being sold anymore, and a long lasting partnership was being formed!

I remember vividly a customer meeting where the top management from both the customer and our company were invited to attend. A one day strategy workshop designed to start a partnering approach. We went through the very well organized day, we spoke, we outlined key projects, we agreed on how to move forward. Both teams were polite and friendly doing their best and planning incremental growth in each field. One hour before the meeting finished, during the conclusions, our customer's CEO thanked the teams for the great work produced, and for the objectives being met. His body language however denoted frustration and impatience. Our SVP asked him to stop, stood up at the table and asked him one last question: "What kept him up at night?", The customer's CEO went silent for a moment, and then told us of his extreme worry that his financial Value Creation was not heading in the right direction. An unorganized brainstorming session started between both teams, with people standing and sitting down, giving opinions and writing a few words on a flip chart. Fifteen minutes into the session we stopped and collected the insights from the group. Three key areas had been outlined and an overall objective for the project defined. The objective was re-defined as to "Double the Value" and it was achieved one year later. That evening when we concluded the meeting we shook hands in commitment to each other, smiling in understanding what needed to be done. It was an ambitious target but one that we all committed to and we worked through the year as real partners, sharing information, changing each other's processes and making it happen. By our changing production practices, and their changing order cycle time, we were able to jointly eliminate several millions Euros from our inventory pipeline which in turn placed the cash back on the customer's balance sheet. We also had better visibility into the order demand cycle which allowed us to reduce production time, take materials out of our factory's work in progress. Our Hug lasted for many years! PM

Mike Wolf is the founder and President of Strategic Sales Skills, a sales coaching and consulting group based in Boston. He has had a 30 year career in sales and executive level sales management, the last 20 years as VP Worldwide Sales for three different technology companies. Mike is also President of Youtopie USA, a behavioral training company www.youtopie.com

Paula Madan has 20 years experience in retail businesses, most recently as Director of Retail Strategy for Electrolux, based in Belgium. Earlier this year she founded the Knowledge Corporation. Both Paula and Mike are Directors of Global Partners Inc, an international management development and training company based in Boston.