The sales field is full of people who consider themselves to be experts. They have many years of experience and they have amassed a great amount of product knowledge. In spite of that, many of them consistently underperform, and in many cases this problem is caused by the fact that they believe themselves to be such experts that they don’t feel any need to expand their skill sets or learn anything new...
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Back in the late 1800s, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto made the observation that 80% of the world's wealth seemed to be controlled by 20% of the people. This handy little observation on the way commodities tend to be ordered and controlled soon developed into a handy rule of thumb for measuring all sorts of relationships: 80% of the church donations are made by 20% of the church members, 20% of the church members create 80% of the complaints (not the same people as in the donation groups!), 20% of the sales reps book 80% of the sales, and 80% of the resources go to address only 20% of the needs...
I am still surprised by the number of people who come to us for negotiation training who fail to grasp even the most basic and obvious concepts of the negotiation process. For instance, one of the most common requests we hear from clients is that they want us to teach them how to convince a vendor or a customer to stopping pushing back on a particular price point and just accept the offer on the table. Folks, that is not a negotiation, that is a conversation, and probably not a very pleasant one at that...
Without a doubt, the biggest test of customer service comes when things go wrong. When they do, you have a perfect opportunity to build trust by sincerely bending over backwards to fix the problem. However, from the customer’s perspective, the biggest issue is not that a mistake has been made or problem exists. He is only watching to see if you will make every attempt to deal with the situation to his satisfaction.
Here are a few quick tips for preserving that sense of personal caring when you are interacting with customers...
