What's Your Message?

Mary Ann Lynn
Marketing Vice President
Carew International, Inc.

We marketing folks spend a lot of time thinking about “the message” -- what the message of our organization should be; keeping all advertising and corporate communications, and even graphic design, consistent with the overall message/image we desire for our organization. Too often, corporate image is seen as a corporate function involving only executive leadership and marketing. In so doing, we miss the tremendous opportunity to leverage each individual member of the organization to support the overall message. And no part of the organization has more potential to support or contradict its overall message than the sales team.

As a sales professional or sales manager, how do you support your organization’s message? First, you need to consider what position your company desires in the marketplace. (If the corporate position has not been articulated to you, ask marketing or sales management to clarify. Better to be clear than make the wrong assumptions.) Is your organization the quality leader? Low cost provider? Innovation leader? Provider of greatest convenience? Leading authority? Once you consider the image your company is trying to project, think about your role in that effort. Do your appearance, style and language support that image? Do the contents of your sales calls and proposals reflect the strengths of your organization and support your company’s overall message?

Let’s say you represent a sales training provider and your company’s image is that of quality leader. You offer top quality, high impact, and life-changing development programs. That market position requires a certain appearance and behavior by its sales representatives. Proposals and sales calls should focus on benefits, impact and ROI associated with development programs, versus the cost. Testimonials would be a powerful tool in your sales effort. A guarantee on your sales training would make sense. Now consider how dramatically these details would change if, instead, you represented a manufacturing parts supplier and sought to be the low cost provider… or if you represented a high tech products provider and were vying to own the innovation leader role in your industry? Your tactics, from personal appearance, to presentation, to selling points, would be vastly different.

Regardless of the position your company seeks, the sales professional’s role in winning that position in your marketplace cannot be over stated. Align your image and message with that of your company to realize your potential as the organization’s most powerful marketing tool.

HIDDEN DANGER IN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

Chuck Terry
Executive Vice President & Chief Sales Officer
Carew International, Inc.

Attaining high marks in customer satisfaction is a universal goal in the business community. There are dozens of business books at your local bookstore and probably hundreds more in print extolling the virtues of keeping your customers delighted with your products and services. In a recent blog titled The New Human Nature of Sales, I referred to the fact that today’s customer wants exactly what they want, in their own unique way; or to quote Burger King, to “have it their way.” What effort could be more worthwhile than the pursuit of customer satisfaction? So where is the danger?

The danger lurks in continually evaluating customer satisfaction based solely upon what the customer prefers within your individual and current menu of offerings. The deception is exaggerated when companies which put too much emphasis on customer satisfaction scores to evaluate their success. Companies are often misled by high customer satisfaction scores, only to learn too late that they have lost market share to their competitors. How could this be if they are delivering such high customer satisfaction ratings? It is pretty simple…failure to innovate.

What happens when someone approaches one of your satisfied customers and offers them a product or service that can do everything yours can, plus something new and cool the customer didn’t even know was possible? Your “satisfied” customer just had the rating scale of customer satisfaction reset for them by the competitor providing them a capability or feature they would have never thought of on their own. You were giving them exactly what they wanted until they found out they could have all that you offered and more!

In their book, The Experience Economy, Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine describe a phenomenon known as “customer sacrifice” that shows the danger of reliance on customer satisfaction surveys. It is a scenario I know all too well. I travel a LOT; and up until several years ago, my airline of choice carried Pepsi products on their planes. I do a good deal of work with Coca-Cola and am very loyal to their products. Upon boarding the plan, I would consistently ask the flight attendant for a Diet coke; to which she replied, “We don’t have Coke, is Pepsi okay?” I am sure you have heard this exact exchange at your local restaurants hundreds of times. After a while, I began ordering Pepsi, even though what I truly wanted was Coke. The airline’s customer satisfaction report would only have reflected that I ordered a Pepsi, they gave me a Pepsi, and thus, a perfect score was registered in that column. There lies the danger… customer satisfaction surveys capture neither this type of customer compromise nor the “customer didn’t know something more was possible” scenario I referenced earlier.

Take a good look around your business. Is there customer sacrifice occurring? Have customers gotten comfortable ordering what you have instead of what they truly desire? Are your competitors developing or already offering innovations that could reset the bar on customer satisfaction?
The customer satisfaction challenge is always evolving -- just as the bicycle document delivery companies learned when someone offered their clients a fax machine. Now the fax machine has been rendered nearly obsolete by e-mail attachments. Resolve to be the one to reset the bar, rather than the one contentedly reading favorable customer satisfaction reports while another provider resets the bar for you.

5 Great Lessons of Team Sports

Chuck Terry
Executive Vice President & Chief Sales Officer
Carew International, Inc.

As an ex-athlete myself, I obviously have a bias in this arena; but over the years, I have noticed a correlation between athletes (or ex-athletes) and the presence of certain professional qualities that provide a competitive advantage in the business arena. The other day, I was having a conversation with my twelve year old son about this very subject. He plays hockey in Colorado and I was explaining to him that the lessons he is learning from playing sports are lessons that will serve him well the rest of his life. With that in mind, here are some of the insights I shared with my twelve year old son about how organized sports are preparing him for his professional career (just in case the pro hockey dream doesn’t pan out):

1) The Value of Hard Work and Sacrifice: In this day and age, I see more and more job applicants entering the work place with a well developed sense of entitlement. In competitive sports, you quickly learn that the only benefit to “just showing up” is a juice box at the end of the game. If you want to play, you have to work hard to earn your opportunity. If you slack off, there is always someone nipping at your heels to get your spot. In order to devote the time to work hard, you have to be willing to sacrifice. While your buddies are playing video games, hanging out with their friends, or watching Hannah Montana, you are practicing hard to get better at your sport. The value of that work ethic is more critical now than it has ever been in the professional world.

2) Insights from Winning and Losing: In competitive sports you experience the euphoria of winning, and the pain of losing. More importantly, you appreciate the preparation and effort behind the win, and the need to identify and correct the mistakes that caused your loss. You learn to enjoy the win but respect your opponent and not become a poor sport. You will probably face them again. Win or lose, you learn from the experience, resist dwelling on the outcome and focus ahead to the next game. Anyone in sales will attest to the power of resilience.

3) Learning How to Be Coached: I have been a fly fishing guide as a hobby for many years, and have taught hundreds of beginners to fly fish. I can attest firsthand that athletes consistently master the technical skills of casting a fly rod much faster than those with no athletic background. Why? Because they know how to be coached. They have mastered the skill of translating verbal instructions into physical actions. I have seen the same correlation in sales training, where the goal is to get beyond the transfer of information to a change in behavior. The ability to be coached obviously translates to every sector of the business world, from your first gig at the burger stand all the way through to the corner office in corporate America.

4) The Power of Teamwork: In any team sport, you quickly learn the value of being a good teammate. From learning to cheer your teammates on to celebrating the outcomes of a well played event, it all has application in the business world. One of the important lessons you learn is that no matter what position you play, doing your job to the best of your ability is critical to the entire TEAM winning. Whether you are the quarterback or the right guard, both jobs being done effectively are critical to winning. It is a pretty common saying that there is no “I” in team. People who have played competitive sports have learned how to be good teammates on the job long before they reach the work place.

5) True Leadership: Leadership is such an integral part of team sports. I can think of no other environment so rich in opportunities to learn and practice the essential skills of leadership, such as leading by example, encouraging those who are struggling, and inspiring your teammates through your words and actions. In sports and in business, some of the strongest leaders on a team may not have the official designation of captain/manager/vice president, but their contribution is every bit as valuable.

There you have it, pretty much just as I explained it to my son. This is not intended to imply that a background in organized sports is necessary to succeed in business; rather, to recognize and evoke valuable skills that may already reside within each of us.

Taking the Fear Out of Negotiations

Ed Albertson
Vice President, National Accounts
Carew International, Inc.

Recent neuroscience research has identified the affects of fear upon the human brain. The not-so-surprising verdict is that fear causes a paralysis of many of the necessary interactions within our brains that tend to produce better decisions and results, regardless of what we are attempting to do. The usual interplay between our logic and our emotions is visibly interrupted, as seen on MRI images of human brains dealing with fear. Such findings indicate that the more we prepare for situations that might put our minds in this state of alarm (negotiations), the less likely our response will be thoughtless (price concessions).

“Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”
- John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on January 20, 1961

In the current economy, the pricing pressures being felt by sales professionals and organizations alike have heightened our trepidation of negotiating terms with customers. Recognizing that JFK’s Inaugural remarks referred to issues with world-impacting stakes, the similarities for sales people today are no less overwhelming. Inherent in JFK’s admonition to “never negotiate out of fear” is the realization that prior planning can greatly impact our aversion to the negotiating process. Chief among the pre-negotiating planning steps we can take is a better understanding of price concessions and why they occur. Carew International research has identified several key actions to help sales professionals avoid the pitfall of price concessions during negotiations:

• Thoroughly know your customer’s needs

• Identify your/your organization’s desired outcome

• Understand the alternatives

Though some of the methods for avoiding these failures may seem obvious, here are some brief guidelines for removing the fear factor from the negotiating process and creating our own, better Pathway to Negotiations.

Thoroughly understanding your customer’s needs is best addressed early in the sales process by undertaking a skillful, well-planned and in-depth exploration of what your customer’s desired situation would be and where their current gaps are in pursing those outcomes. A thorough understanding of your customer’s needs means asking the right questions of the right people and hearing the right answers before concluding what you believe you have to offer is a “fit” for your customer. When you can match your capabilities to your customer’s needs, the value of your solution is apparent to your customer, thus reducing the need to make concessions. Simply put, concessions are the by-product of unconvinced customers.

“Water seeks its own level,” and planning for negotiations is no different. Failing to know what you really want as an outcome before you enter negotiations predisposes you to unsatisfactory results. The higher you set your own goals and expectations, the higher you’ll reach to attain them. Always begin negotiating from a position that is based upon a personal commitment to achieve the best outcome for yourself, your company, and your customer.

Create a “safety net” for yourself and others by determining what a “second-best” solution, or back-up plan, might look like to each party involved, from each respective point of view. A very fundamental shortcoming of human nature is the preoccupation with our own view of things, to the exclusion of other points of view. Failure to understand the alternatives available to you, your customers and anyone else who has a stake in the outcome, can narrow the opportunity for successful outcomes for all involved.

Paying heed to these steps when planning for negotiations will help you approach such events with much more confidence and much less fear; thereby greatly increasing your rate of success. Indeed, we can exceed the need to concede, and then succeed!

For more in-depth information on negotiations strategies, read Carew International’s Defending the Price white paper or visit Pathways to Negotiations on the Carew International website for detailed program information.