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Day 4 of 5: Trust-based Business Development in a Recession: Principle 3, Long-Term and Relationship Focus

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This is day 4 of 5 in our week-long series about selling in a Recession using the Four Trust Principles. Today’s principle is Principle 3—Focus on the medium-to-long term, not the short term. This implies a focus on relationships, not transactions.

Even more than the other Trust Principles, this one is relevant to selling in recessions.

On Day 1 we suggested that the right trust-based attitude in a recession is to remember that down cycles are only half the story—and the half in which trust is most indelibly created. All strong relationships live by the motto ”for richer and poorer, for better and worse…”—and the test of the relationship is rocky times. The time to harvest trust is in good times; the time to build it is now.

You find out who your friends are when times are tough. You find out who really cares about you when they have to choose between self-serving and other-serving opportunities. And others find out how you make those choices. By choosing to defer self-aggrandizing activities in support of your customers—precisely when it’s hardest to do and takes the most courage—you increase your service to your customers the most, and earn their trust.

The suggestions that follow are built from that perspective. Please–add your own ideas to the list so that everyone can benefit. Here are 10 ideas to prime the pump:

1. Buy two tickets now for a major cultural or athletic event scheduled for mid to late 2010. Send one to a highly favored customer or client, with a note saying “We will get through all this, together, and I look forward to celebrating with you once we do. Keep this ticket in a safe place, because mine is the seat next to yours.”

2. Pick your top 3 clients, and strategize internally on how you can strengthen your relationship for the long run. Then go discuss those plans with those three clients, telling them exactly what you’ve done, and why.

3. Help everyone you know who has been laid off – provide advice, contacts, and/or just listen. These are people who are potentially great customers down the road; but don’t do it for that reason, do it because you care.

4. If you’re a consulting organization, now is a great time to establish your alumni network. And if you already have one, kick up the level of involvement. Host cocktail parties in various locations. Establish or update the directory. Get your alumni an intranet page, or a devoted Facebook group or other aggregation. Facilitate their networking.

5. If you’re a lawyer or consultant and not using social media to connect with your clients, now is the time for this type of investment– build your network and help your clients build theirs.

6. If you are one of the many unfortunate individuals who has lost a job, don’t burn bridges in anger, hurt or frustration. You’re now selling you. Keep the long term in mind. Join the alumni network—or offer to help create one. Use social media. Begin networking ASAP. Leaders don’t like causing hardship—they prefer to help. How you act in the days after a layoff advertises your trustworthiness.

7. If a key customer is in the middle of an important job with you and they can’t afford for you to finish it, talk it over with them and offer to defer payment until such time as the customer can pay. That could be a long time. But if the relationship is good, this generous offer creates trust and greatly reduces the risk of nonpayment. And the cost of financing these days is very low. It doesn’t cost much to be generous; it lowers credit risk by creating trust and reciprocity; and showing a little faith and courage does wonders for the relationship.

8. Consider what you can offer your clients’ children. Seriously. A financial planner in Canada offered free investment planning education to a client’s 12 and 14 year old children. His co-workers chided him because there were no fees associated with it. His response was, “are you kidding? Their father loves me for it; that’s good for referrals. And someday his kids will inherit a lot of his wealth. I’m in this business for the long haul—my lifetime and the lifetimes of my clients.”

9. If you offer a client a special "one off" deal, be clear about why you’re doing it. For any deal you craft now, imagine doing the same deal 100 times under similar circumstances. Would you? Would your client? If you didn’t answer “yes” to both, go back to the drawing board. Don’t worry about what you’re going to “get” in the near-term, or even from whom. It all works out in the end when we’re willing to do what’s right. And the end is what matters when we’re living this principle.

10. If you’re a leader, be prepared to lead in a most personal way. The month after 9/11, Koh Boon Hwee, then-chairman of Singapore Air, described the US airline industry’s reaction to the drop in travel: “they laid off huge numbers of employees.” By contrast, at Singapore Air, Koh took a massive pay cut; his direct reports took sizable hits; and everyone took a significant but smaller pay cut. He laid off no one. It’s no wonder that travelers, employees and shareholders alike are loyal to such companies. They live the trust principle of long-term focus, and are richly rewarded for it.

Day 3 of 5: Trust-based Business Development in a Recession: Principle 2, Collaboration

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Monday we announced a five-day blogpost on developing business in a recession based on each of the Four Trust Principles.

Trust is paradoxical; as is the best approach to recessionary times.

Yesterday we offered ideas based on Trust Principle 1, Client Focus. Today we highlight Principle 2, Collaboration.

If trust is important to business development generally, it is particularly important in a recession. Collaboration is one of the four Trust Principles because:

Collaboration with existing clients cuts business development costs—selling to existing clients is far less expensive than selling new business.

Collaboration with others—including even competitors—offers scale economies.

Collaboration allows reconfiguration—of markets, production, services.

Most importantly, collaboration is inherently about relationships—and not about competition. In a recession, that’s the message you want to send—now is the time to strengthen relationships. You’ll reap the benefits later.

How to do it? Here are 14 ideas to prime the pump. Please: add your own. Let’s collaborate on generating a great list.

1. If you’re a consultant of any type: write your next proposal seated next to your client. Bring all your backup records, rent a conference room, and collaboratively proceed to write a joint proposal. Rather than deal with issues after the proposal has been written and sent and it shows up as a disagreement in the final sales meeting—raise it in joint meeting.

2. If you’re a speaker or trainer, put together a speaking tour, or a combined webinar, of like-minded people–including those you used to think of as competitors. 

3. Does your company outsource key processes? Is the recession causing strains in the relationship? Have an offsite meeting with key leaders of each firm, with the agenda of “where can we collaborate more, and argue with each other less?”

4. Answer the question the customer asked you: not the one you wanted to answer. The customer is not your competitor–collaborate with the customer by talking straight.

5. If you’re a B2B manufacturing salesperson, call a key customer. Suggest the two firms sit down together offsite for a day and discuss “what could we do better together to make things cheaper, faster, or more profitable for both of us?” Be prepared to share your manufacturing process, costs, and profit margins, so you can figure it out together.

6. If you’re a professional services provider, sit down with your client and see which portion of your services could be performed more cost effectively by the client, or how your costs could be reduced. For example, if preliminary research needs to be done, ask if the client has someone who could do it, and get approval to rely on it, or use it as a base. If you charge for materials, let the client make the copies and produce the the books. When you travel for the client offer to use the client’s travel service if the client can get a better price on travel.

7. If you’re professional services firm with underemployed staff, offer to swap similarly underemployed staff with a client. Both will gain valuable perspective and experience without being taken off critical work. The employees involved will feel grateful and challenged. And the linkages between the firms will be strengthened. None of which would easily happen in good economic times.

8. If you’re in a business where sales are large and take time, then at the next sales presentation meeting, have a client individual co-present with you. And make a point of it, saying “working collaboratively with you is what we believe in, and it’s even more important in tough times like these.” Actions speak louder than words.

9. If you’re in a functional department of a large company (HR, legal, IT), identify 3-4 of the same departments in other large companies in your geographic area. Create a collaborative work group across the companies that meets (within bounds of legal agendas) to share best practices and work opportunities.  

10. Give your receivables clerk a budget to buy flowers or chocolates for the payables clerk at your most important customers for Valentine’s day (you’ve still got a few days).

11. If you’re in sales or customer relationship management, go find who, if anyone, is handling innovation for your firm. Ask them if they would like to collaborate on that innovation work with Customer A, Customer B and Customer C?

12. Ditto in reverse. Ask your key customer whether anyone is handling innovation in their firm—and if they would appreciate the chance to work with your innovation people.

13. Look over your professional services providers. Is there anyone with whom you can work a barter arrangement? (Remember to check with your accountant on the tax issues, even if you don’t want to be appointed by the President).

14. If you’re in sales, go talk to your customers’ salespeople.  Share best practices and success stories; also share horror stories about how each organization treats salespeople from other companies (including how theirs treat you). You will gain perspective and insight about your customer’s company, and they may even put in a good word for you with their company’s buyers.

There’s our list. How about you? In the spirit of collaboration, please add an idea of your own. We want to hear from you.

Day 2 of 5: Trust-based Business Development in a Recession: Principle 1, Client Focus

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Yesterday we announced a five-day blogpost on developing business in a recession based on each of the Four Trust Principles. Trust, we suggest, is paradoxical. That’s exactly how we must meet recessionary times.

 

Today we offer 22 specific ideas based on Principle 1, Client Focus: Focus on the Customer for the Customer’s Sake, Not Just the Seller’s Sake. 

Recessions drive us to self-centered fear; but they are simply the down cycle in a long-term relationship. Client focus shows dramatically that you are in business relationships for the duration, not just for while they’re convenient.

Our hope is to prime the pump with specific ideas.  Please add your own ideas, appropriate for your own organizations, in the comments. Let’s make this a resource for all.

1. You’re a staff strategist or a line marketer. You have one mandate: Focus. Downplay new lead generation– recessions are time to dance with the one who brung you. Good strategists know saying yes to one means saying “no” to others. Resist the temptation to go RFP-hunting. Let your #1 customers know who loves them, and show it.

2. You’re a financial planner. You fear client phone calls in a recession—they mean withdrawals. Do the opposite—call them. Give them life advice, like “next year is not the time to retire after all.” In times of fear, those who reach out to hear the pain are those who gain later.

3. You’re an accounting firm. It’s tax season. Everyone thinks you’re busy. Surprise them with a 2-3 hour clinic for your clients’ kids who are now college graduates on how to do their own taxes.

4. You’re a CPA firm. Offer to “spotlight” your client’s human interest / charity / goodwill story on your firm’s blog or newsletter.

5. You’re a restaurant owner. You know who your good customers are. Surprise them next visit by picking up the tab. Quietly. After the meal.

6. You sell insurance but don’t track your clients’ payment status because you already got the commission. Start tracking them now. In a recession no one wants unintentionally lapsed LTD or long term care policies.

7. You’re majority owner of a private company. Take off your shareholder hat and put on your investment hat. This is when you grow share by growing trust. Draw down on the shareholder account to invest in the employee, customer and supplier relationship accounts.

8. You provide tech support to home businesses. That green stuff about lowering electrical costs is a lot more interesting to customers than it was 6 months ago; bone up on it.

9. You’re a doctor, and recessions mean more scrambling for less insurance money. When you have good test results for a nervous patient, don’t wait for the next visit. Call and celebrate with the patient for a few minutes.

10. You’re a one-person consulting shop. Recessions drive changes in customer needs. Can your firm change on a dime to meet new client needs? Of course you can, you’re a one-person firm. Figure out what those new needs are, then go talk to the client.

11. You’re in corporate sales and your funnel has slowed to a crawl. Do your research, then offer your prospect three ideas that can reduce costs in the next quarter without any extra work.

12. You’re anyone. In a recession, customers are more worried and self-focused than usual. Go take that course on listening and empathy you’ve been putting off; it’s twice as important now, and you’ve no longer got the excuse of being too busy.

13. You’re a practice area head in a professional services firm; project or client relationship managers report to you. When was the last time you visited the top 3-4 clients? Go visit, with your client manager. Your agenda? “Just wanted to hear what’s new with you. Besides our own services, what can we do for you?" And don’t even think about charging the time.

14. Your customers are in retail (or chemicals; or telecom–whatever). Ask yourself what’s changed, new, and critical to them because of the recession. Now ask what you can do to help. (“Increase sales” and “cut price” don’t count). Then redesign your offerings.

(Example: for us, professional services firms are big clients. They are cutting back discretionary travel and training. The “obvious” answer is webinars. But as one client says, “There’s only so much webinar you can take stuck in your cubicle from 9 to 5. We’re being webinar-ed to death.” Our solution? The Onsite Offsite(TM). The best of offsites, minus the costs, but without the compromises of conventional one-way datapipe solutions).

15. You’re a consulting firm. Don’t succumb to the“hey, we’ve all got to pitch in here, can’t you lower your rate for us” argument. Pitch in, yes. Make strategic investments, yes. Re-tool your offerings, yes. But don’t lower your rates. It just says you had “padding” before. And an insolvent consultant is no help to clients.

16. You’re a law firm; offer a series of brown-bag talks given by partners on recession-relevant topics. Invite your existing clients.

17. You’re a development director for a charitable organization. Your donors are your customers. Instead of asking them for money, turn the tables; ask how a particular donor is affected by the recession. How can you add value to his or her life? With whom can you put them in touch?

18. You’re a systems firm. Your tech leaders need speaking training. Invite three clients to join so they can learn too.

19. After a long day at the office a longtime client contact calls to tell you he’s been laid off. You have to leave, but offer to speak later that night, to help out in any way you can.

20. Some of your customers sell to other customers of yours. Make introductions; then make more.

21. You’re an accounting firm. Hold topical lunchtime 60-minute phone calls for five of your medium-sized clients’ treasurers on recession-relevant topis. You run the logistics and line up the topics. And don’t wait until after tax season, they’re hurting now.

22. Just to practice Principle 1, Client Focus, go drop dimes in someone’s parking meter, or pay the toll for the guy behind you. It’s cheap behavioral training for client focus. And it makes two people feel good.

There you go; 22 ideas based on Principle 1, Customer focus.

What did you learn from other businesses that might work for your own?

Tune in tomorrow, when we list specific business development ideas for Principle 2, Collaboration. And please–add your own ideas in the comments section below.

 

Trust-based Business Development in a Recession

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We at Trusted Advisor Associates try our best to practice the Trust Principles we espouse. We have found they work for business development, as well as in other aspects of business.

We believe they are particularly relevant in a recessionary environment. That’s why we’re devoting Trust Matters this week to selling in down times.

Today’s post will set up our perspective—and the next four days will deal with business development ideas based on the Four Trust Principles, as follows:

Monday Thinking about sales from a trust perspective
Tuesday Principle 1: Client / customer focus
Wednesday Principle 2: Collaboration
Thursday Principle 3: Medium-to-long-term perspective
Friday Principle 4: Transparency

The Trust Perspective. Trust is a paradoxical thing. It requires risk-taking when we’re risk-averse. It requires doing the opposite of our first instincts.

Recessions are the same. The thing consumers want to do—stop spending and save—paradoxically drives the recession deeper. The one thing businesses want to do—cut costs, squeeze suppliers and customers, and scale back plans—paradoxically drives the recession deeper.

Trust is about relationships, not transactions. Thinking of downtimes per se is transactional thinking. Thinking of downtimes as one half of a business cycle is relationship thinking. And it’s what you do in tough times that determines how others trust you in the good times.

Trust is based on being willing to put the other’s needs first. But in a recession, the instinct to take care of Number One has the same trust-destroying effect as selfishness does in personal relationships. And it hurts business development in both the short and long run.

Trust and Business Development. We’re going to offer a few specific ideas based on these principles during the week.

What do we mean by specific ideas? Here are a few starters:

• Pick a local charity or non-profit organization; make a significant donation to them. It will be completely unexpected, very needed, and very appreciated. Don’t worry about publicity—word will get around.

• Pick a few important existing customers—you can’t help everyone—and do an important project for them, one that would normally have trouble getting done because it’s long term and visionary. And do it for free.

• Increase your severance package benefits. Now.

• Use collaboration as a form of innovation. In our business, we are working with clients to develop the Onsite Offsite, a way of delivering distance seminars at in-house costs, packaged innovatively to go way beyond traditional webinars.

Finally, one of our Trust Principles is Collaboration. We’d like to share our ideas with as many people as possible. We invite you to pitch in and make this a truly collaborative week by adding in your own comments and ideas.

Stay tuned to Trust Matters this week.

 

 

Transparency and Selling

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President Obama directly links transparency to economic performance.

In his inauguration address, he asserted “…those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account, to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day, because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

Lately transparency has been in short supply.

Offices for sale. Ponzi schemes. The former mayor of Baltimore has just been indicted on charges that she accepted illegal gifts, including gift cards intended for the poor that she allegedly used instead for a holiday shopping spree.

Whether with respect to government, or to building client relationships, transparency is at the very root of trust.

That may seem obvious. Motherhood and apple pie. But for those of us with a career background in sales, transparency requires deprogramming. We were taught:

• Never share a weakness
• Never admit a competitor strength
• Never share cost information
• Always get as much margin as you can
• Don’t share information that could decrease your ability to close a sale

Oh yeah, and be customer focused.

What goes around comes around. In the long run, the truth inevitably bubbles to the top. You can get credit for saying it—or blame for resisting it.

As Charlie Green said in a HuffingtonPost piece, “If we see someone as being transparent, then nagging questions about motive disappear. We no longer speculate about, ‘What’s in it for him? What’s the hidden meaning? Why’d he say that? Is he lying?’ and so on. We accept the person at face value for what they say, even if—sometimes, particularly if—what they say reflects imperfection. That works in sales and in politics.” 

Yet, we’re trained to go in come back with information that will close the sale. Hunt it, kill it and bring it back to eat.

• What if, instead of dancing around an answer we don’t know, we just admit we don’t know?
• What if, instead of promising something we probably can’t deliver, we admit that and then tell them what we can do?
• What if, instead of offering “teaser” pricing and then covertly getting it on the back end, we share our cost structure?

These examples are counter-intuitive—downright treasonous in some circles.

Without the pretension, void of false promises and out on a limb – we are, admittedly exposed, naked and vulnerable.

But wouldn’t you rather buy from a seller who is willing to show you his cards, even if—perhaps because—you both know it might cost him the sale? That visceral reaction works in reverse when transparency dominates relationships (think Madoff, Blagojevich).

Transparency creates a powerful pull toward you. It also, by the way, lets you sleep easier.

Sales Benchmarking: What to Measure in a Tough Economy?

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To turn the tide on sputtering revenue numbers, sales organizations ratchet up pressure on sellers to hit targets.

Many will seek a fool-proof formulaic antidote. The more scientific it feels, the more control it gives over success–or so they presume.

Some swear by sales benchmarking.  Landslide Technologies’ SFA (sales force automation) application ensures you can “govern the sales process in an effort to drive large deals through the sales pipeline in a consistent manner."  Just use the SFA application to track your big deals and they’ll pump out new accounts like a canning machine on an assembly line.

Do benchmarks work?  Or are they a desperate attempt to CYA at each level of the food chain in the event of a day of reckoning?

One recent article from a worldwide sales training company described benchmarking as “a sales rep’s GPS, helping to map out routes that were either successful or time-consuming in the past in order to devise a more efficient course”.

Here’s their GPS system:

To simplify this already-simple model: all things being equal, if you make more calls per day (CPD) or increase your close rate (CR) or increase the average size deal (ADS) or if you have more salespeople (SP), you will increase your AS (Annual Sales).

The author of the article lauds this wildly lagging indicator of performance stating, “their (sellers) improved time management efficiency as the result of this benchmarking model will free themselves up from dependence on marketing departments for leads, support and differentiators.”

I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Feeling liberated yet? What a relief! Without burdensome leads, support and differentiators from marketing, sellers can work the levers on the benchmarking formula and land on their AS (don’t pardon the pun).

Some of the largest sales organizations tell their team to abide by their model – or else.

Now, let’s stipulate that tracking and measuring sales activity is critical to success. Still–too many sales organization have a knee-jerk response to sluggish short-term performance, namely engaging in short-term solutions.

There lies the slippery slope of micromanagement.  Knee-jerk short-term solutions to short term indicators.  It’s a recipe for low trust and high turnover.

Eventually, quality selling activity gives way to “prettying up” the spreadsheet. “My, that’s a good looking chart,” says the visiting exec from HQ.  Meanwhile, the team is thinking, “those numbers are bogus; plugged into Excel the night before to impress the brass.”

GIGO.  Garbage in, garbage out.

When I managed a regional sales organization, corporate decided to split the sales force into hunters and farmers–to improve the “cost of sales” ratio of gross comp to revenue.

We lost a $10.5 million deal. Why? We severed the relationship between their rep and the procurement director.   They, in turn, severed us.

We broke their trust, plain and simple.

What benchmark tracks lost accounts and missed opportunities due to relationship issues? None I know of–yet their impact is an order of magnitude bigger than what benchmarks mark.

Harvey McKay (author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive) offers a better predictor of selling success than all the formulae, algorithms and sales funnels combined. It’s a list of questions he calls the McKay 66.  He suggests that relationship-oriented information is king (mostly centered around the client relationship – not their stated needs).

For example:

* #39. On what subjects (outside of business) does the customer have strong feelings?
* #55. What is he/she most proud of having achieved?
* #58. What moral or ethical considerations are involved when you work with this customer?

Doesn’t it make intuitive sense that knowledge of answers to these kinds of intimate questions reveal more about our progress with a prospect or account than the number of dials, appointments or calls?

Selling always was and always will be, first and foremost, a referendum, not on process and statistics, but on the loyalty developed between sellers who can build relationships with buyers.

The Trouble with Buying Processes

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Big companies have a process for buying things. They define the specs, they shop the vendors, they use specialized purchasing departments to define procedures and processes.

They have similar processes for recruiting human capital (aka human beings). Define the specs, shop the vendors, use special processes.

And ditto for selling. Define targets, channels, measure hit rates, etc.

What these processes all have in common is a focus on the efficiency of the process—and not so much on the effectiveness of the result.

Purchasing managers, HR recruiters and sales managers alike would benefit from Malcolm Gladwell’s recent New Yorker piece title Most Likely to Succeed: How Do We Hire When We Can’t Tell Who’s Right for the Job?

Gladwell’s opening metaphor is about predicting the success of a college football quarterback in the pro game. Despite extraordinary efforts at analytical and statistical rigor—you just never quite seem to know.

His target subject is teaching—how difficult it is to predict the success of a teacher by focusing on any available statistical predictor.

Yet the value of getting it right is huge. Gladwell points to research that says a good teacher dwarfs the effect of any other factor on a child’s education. The US could overcome its middle-of-the-road global relative performance simply by substituting the bottom 6% of teachers for average teachers.

The problem is, you can’t predict success in teachers, anymore than you can in quarterbacks.

The solution, he says, is to stop focusing on accreditation and criteria. Instead, have the equivalent of apprenticeships, open admissions, tryouts open to all. The good ones prove themselves quickly, as do the bad ones. Find out who they are not by controlling input metrics, but by letting people jump into the water and seeing who can swim.

I suggest that the same problem exists in evaluating suppliers, recruits, and sales funnels. These are all deeply complex, human, messy relationship issues. Good customer, employee and supplier relationships make a huge difference.

But the prevailing business wisdom is that we can analyze and measure our way into defining the right relationships. Think of RFPs (requests for proposal) or recruiting specs.

The motivation behind select-by-spec and hire-by-numbers is complex. It’s part blind faith in “science.” It’s part fear-driven cover-your-butt desire to appear blameless. It’s part fear of interaction with other people.

But whatever, it’s hurting us. In the name of efficiency, many business processes have been employed to bring human relationships to a least common denominator level. The result has been low effectiveness.

Let people mix it up. Inefficiencies can be dwarfed by effectiveness. It’s as true in work as it is in the NFL and the classroom.

LL Bean: Urban Myth or Rural Superstition?

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Over at The Consumerist, there’s a snappy bunch of stories about the legend of LL Bean, the Maine-based outfitter who just wants to make you happy. As one reader tells the story, they insisted on taking back monogrammed shirts that his wife had bought in entirely the wrong size.

He tried to insist it was his fault, not LL Bean’s, but Bean wouldn’t take no for an answer. They just had to make sure that his monogrammed shirts would fit him by accepting the old ones for return. (The comments alone are worth reading for a thorough exploration of the pros and cons of having such a liberal policy. Plus they’re fun.)

But let’s talk about the larger issue. LL Bean is not the only firm behaving this way. Every time I teach an exercise on customer satisfaction, someone has a Nordstrom’s tale to tell. There’s a lunch counter in Lincoln Nebraska that uses an honor box to sell sandwiches on the sidewalk for a buck each in the summertime. And so on.

In discussing the dynamics of such policies, I’m bemused to find how many people insist, “it won’t work.” If you point out that it has worked for over a hundred years for LL Bean, they repeat, “it won’t work.” Endless loop.

Sure, it can be abused, and sometimes it is. What’s interesting is, why isn’t it abused more often? In Lincoln, reportedly the homeless people monitor each other to be sure no one takes undue advantage. (I know, I know, it’d never happen in New York. Except I bet it does).

There is an innate sense among people that will keep anthropologists, bio-ethicists, animal intelligence students and other social researchers busy for years to come trying to “explain” it. Meanwhile, it clearly “is.”

And you can make book on it. This is the principle that underlies trust-based selling: if people trust you, they will strongly prefer to give you the business. There’s no better way to get people to trust you than to trust them, by putting yourself at risk.

David Maister always put an explicit guarantee on his work: 100% satisfaction or just pay him what you thought it was worth, including nothing.

Takers? None.

The act of the offer ensures it will rarely be taken up–as long as the offer is genuine.

This is reciprocity in the sense that academic Robert Cialdini writes about as the number one source of influence. If you treat me right, I’ll treat you right. If you listen to me, I’ll listen to you. If you trust me, I’ll trust you.

The wonder is not how often our trust gets abused; it’s how few Bernie Madoffs there are.

I remember hearing of a pizza chain that offered a satisfaction guarantee—if you didn’t like the pizza, you’d get one free. One nasty customer kept saying he wasn’t satisfied, and demanding another new one each time he ordered.

Finally the owner went to the customer and said, “I’m really sorry, but it appears we have failed consistently to meet your high standards. It frustrates me no end, but I have to confess, we just don’t seem to be able to make a good enough pizza. I wish we could, but we have no choice but to reluctantly stop selling you our inferior pizza. Please accept our apologies.”

Free Medium Coffee and Warm Fuzzies

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What did the new Dunkin Donuts store owner do right? The sign says it all…”Free Medium Coffee”.

Do you think he drove traffic to his new store? Lots. I had to look twice at the second line; “No Purchase Necessary."

That’s different.

Free just feels different.

New businesses offer discounts, coupons and rebates all the time. They imply, “We’ll give you a good deal if you come check us out.” Free, on the other hand, says, “We’re willing to invest in a relationship with you and know we’ll need to earn your business.”

Now flip it. How obliged do you feel after hunting for the coupon, clipping it out, sorting it by category and then remembering to use it before it expires? You feel like they owe you the coffee, don’t you? At best coupons and other promotions offer a balanced exchange; at worst, buyers feel distrust about the process. How much pain have you felt due to coupon or rebate issues? One study suggested that 50% of all rebates never get turned in.

Now let’s look since the savvy store manager erected the sign:

Day #1 – On your first visit, you look around as you approach the counter with caution. Suspicious of a catch, you place your order, “I saw your sign and I’d like a free medium coffee.” When the person on the other side of the counter smiles and promptly pours your Dunkin Decaf, you wonder if the other shoe will drop. When you realize there’s no string attached, they just went from stranger to friend.

Day #2 – You know you’re getting a donut with the coffee. Why? Because you feel a strange sense of gratitude for a second cup of free coffee. I bet you never felt a sense of appreciation after using coupons? (By the way, after day #1, you told at least three friends about the free medium coffee because you like to give away free stuff too, even if it’s someone else’s).

Day #3 – “Dunkin Decaf, cream, no sugar Mr. Slatin?” says the lady in a pink and orange uniform. “Thanks for remembering Janice, let me also get a half dozen glazed and a half dozen with sprinkles, an egg, bacon and cheese croissant and a box of munchkins.”

What just happened?

The seller created value by giving you something without expecting anything in return. Did he have a previous relationship with you? No. But now he does. He changed the feeling you had about his product or service from neutral to positive. Warm fuzzies. Why are warm fuzzies important? Well despite popular belief – all decisions are based on emotion and justified by logic. Dunkin Donuts went through your mouth to get to your heart.

What’s your “free medium coffee”?

The Curious Case of Curiosity in Selling

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What’s the top, number one, single greatest factor affecting success in sales?

There are often multiple answers to questions like that, because all the prime candidates overlap similar territory. You might argue for a can-do attitude, or customer focus, or a committed team.

Let me make the case for curiosity.

Imagine being in a constant state of heightened curiosity when you are with, doing work for, and thinking about your customers. What would that look like?

The answers fall into two broad categories, I think:

1. If you were curious on your customer’s behalf, you would:

• Notice an awful lot of things about their people, products and customers
• Formulate many hypotheses
• Ask a lot of questions to pursue those hypotheses
• Want to know lots of things on general principle: preferences, history, culture, practices
• Be other-focused

2. And while you were being curious, you would spend less time on:

• Worrying about how to get the sale
• Worrying about how to speed a decision, or close, or qualify a lead
• Trying to portray yourself in ways you assume will influence the customer

Now here’s the punch line. Most approaches to selling tell you to ask a lot of questions—basically like the first category.

But they also tell you to worry about that second category. In fact, they say the sole purpose of all questions is to get the sale. Most sales approaches say you absolutely should worry about getting the sale, speeding a decision, qualifying, etc. Which kills curiosity.

Curiosity says, to hell with that. Curiosity says, the purpose of questions is to find out what could be: what could be better, what the right thing is, what the customer should do.

The paradox, of course, is that curiosity-driven selling just plain works better. It works better because the questions are grounded in the customer’s world, not the sales person’s needs.

The linear, process-driven, metrics-based approach to selling that has become so prevalent has many virtues, but one gigantic, glaring defect: By trying to maximize the sale, it has devalued the customer—thereby reducing sales effectiveness (insert ironic music here).

Curiosity may have killed some cat once upon a time; but it serves salespeople well. Curiosity isn’t a sales tactic. Done right, sales are a natural byproduct of being curious.  There’s something very simple and right about that.