Rick Page - Make Winning a Habit [с таблицами]

“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.

Whenever you have turnover in your sales force — on your side or on the client’s side — emotional bank accounts, as referred to by Stephen Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, go back to zero.

The real issue is turnover. If companies spent a fraction of the money solving their sales turnover problem that they do trying to automate their sales force to solve customer problems, they might start to build some real relationships.

But getting all the information and contacts into the computer is designed so that no one person has to have a relationship with the client. We can swap people out as the call centers change shifts. In direct field sales and marketing, though, capturing the little black book and ignoring the turnover problem simply won’t work.

While it is true that information is important to relationships, it is only a tool. There are missing links between our objective in the account — account dominance or preferred vendor status — and an information tool (see Figure 7–1).

Let’s work backwards: If you want to dominate an account, what the client wants is trust. Trust is built over time. Relationships are built over time. In complex sales, people buy from people—not computers. You can sell online, but not if you want trust. Not if you want account dominance.

If you want to sell commodities, sell them over the Web and service them with a call center — the same for noncompetitive reorders. But strategic business-to-business (B2B) services and products include greater career risk to the buyer and therefore require trust. In order to maintain trust, you need continuity of the relationship, yet sales turnover in the high-tech industry averages around 30 percent per year.

A CRM system is a repository for information — not a process. Information about problem resolution and purchasing history is very important, but only to the degree that it builds trust and continuity so that clients don’t have to constantly train new salespeople on how to sell to them. In addition to this continuity, the company has to have delivered value because performance on the last sale is the gateway to repeat business. When your product or solution is performing and producing results and value — and you have documented those results — then risk begins to lower.

A CRM system is a repository for information, not a process.

As risk lowers, trust goes up. This is why IBM was able to sell its products for such a premium in the 1980s. The company lowered risk for IT directors. In order to do this, you have to have a sales process that rewards not just customer satisfaction but also customer loyalty. And there is a big gap between the two.

In some studies, there is as much as a 40 percent gap between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Satisfied customers will still buy from somebody else. As Herb Cohen, the great negotiating trainer, said in one of his speeches, “They care, but not that much.”

Several years ago, Blake Batley met with a vice president of sales of a large CRM software provider and asked him, “What makes your CRM application so much better than all the other CRM applications in the market that seem to be positioned the same way?”

The vice president said, “Well, our application is great because it gives our clients insight into all the history and interactions they have had with their own customers.”

“But how does your CRM application help your salespeople defeat your competition?” Blake asked. “How does it help them win deals and make their numbers?”

The vice president didn’t have an answer.

Having access to contacts and a customer history alone doesn’t help you win deals.

Technology can’t make up for what hit-and-run selling does to destroy trust. And if you want to be trusted, you have to have trustworthy people — people who can sell consultatively, who know their clients’ business as well as they do their own, and who are willing to work collaboratively to solve business problems.

David Stargel, our principal in charge of the Deloitte account, relates this story. A partner at Deloitte called on an executive client, and although the executive didn’t have any work for the consultant, he agreed to meet with him anyway.

A few months later, the partner called on the executive again. He still didn’t have any work for him, but again, they met anyway.

The executive continued to meet with the consultant every time he called on him, never having any work for his firm, for 15 months. Finally, at the end of those 15 months, the executive called the consultant with a project.

The consultant excitedly offered to get his team together and present a proposal.

“That won’t be necessary,” the executive told him. “The last 15 months have been a test. If you will stay with me when I am not buying anything, I am confident you will stay with me when I am.”

Information is vital to the degree that it supports all these missing links and strategies. As Klaus Besier, who grew SAP America in its early days, says, “Knowledge of birthdays alone is not going to give you competitive advantage.”

If your objective is to reduce cost and you end up nickel-and-diming your clients by not giving them adequate service, then a bad CRM implementation can ultimately cost you.

Many CRM initiatives are ill fated when they get to the field sales force because they are implemented by IT and implemented backwards. Considering the system first — and then addressing the needs of marketing, legal, and customer service — before finally talking to your sales force about their sales process and what they need to improve, is the wrong approach.

The result is asking your primary revenue generators to do data entry for the rest of the firm. Think about the basic economics of this: If a salesperson has a yearly quota of $2 million and works 2,000 hours in a year, he or she must sell $1,000/hour to make quota. Yet the CRM implementation wants you to make that salesperson into a $1,000/hour data-entry clerk—for the benefit of everyone else (see Figure 7–2).