May 04 2007
Only Your Customers Can Tell You If You Are As Good As You Think You Are!
Obtaining continual feedback against a set of established criteria is vital if an organisation is to retain its existing top clients and seek to improve its standing and the quality of its service levels to them.
There are at least seven benefits of regular feedback.
• Feedback reveals your customer’s current and future plans.
• Seeing your business from your customer’s point of view allows you to answer the question “would you do business with you?” - if not why not?
• Feedback allows you to tailor your service levels so that you enjoy maximum customer satisfaction at a minimum cost.
• If you don’t ask you’ll never know how you are doing until it’s too late! Feedback is magnified by the ‘ice berg factor’ making it more critical than it originally appears.
• Feedback can reveal what your competition are doing helping you to be a consistently strong contender.
• Gaining a reputation for wanting to hear feedback can actually make money for you.
How Often?
This will depend entirely on the importance of the account and revenue levels being achieved - or anticipated.
Assessing The Feedback You Receive:
If the feedback you have been receiving to-date has not been useful, ask yourself the following questions:
• Do I ask enough questions?
• Do I ask the right questions?
• Do I communicate effectively about why I am asking the questions?
• Do I ask the right people?
• Do I know how to use the data I collect?
• Am I organised to respond to the information?
• Do I value and trust the information I receive?
Remember,The Account Review Process:
• Is a non-threatening meeting.
• It is a fact finding session not a sales event in the short term. But ……………….
• It is highly likely, that during this meeting you will uncover additional short, medium and long term opportunities.
Well, we finally gave up on BlogTalkRadio, unfortunately we were experiencing too many “technical problems” Therefore, as from next week, we will be using the more reliable podcast to conduct interviews and make announcements on Top 10 Sales Articles.
I have downloaded a trial version of some very “whizzy” software, which also allows me to record Skype conversations, so expect me to use this facility extensively and have some interesting interviews here too, in the coming weeks.
Talking of interviews, I recently provided David Bain of PurpleInternetMarketing with my thoughts on article writing and publishing. David will shortly be launching 13 Pillars of Internet Marketing’ and you can listen to an excerpt of the interview here
Another great interview I urge you to take in is Clayton Shold of Salesopedia in conversation with the immensely interesting and hugely experienced Joanne Black. You can listen in here.
Finally, the featured “Top Sales Expert” on Top 10 Sales Articles this week is Dave Kahle of the DaCo Corporation. Dave has a live one-one seminar for sales managers coming up on May 21st/22nd – full details here
In addition, you can find full details of his excellent Business to Business Sales Academy here
That’s just about it – don’t forget that from next week I will be posting twice every week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Was that a “whoopeeee” I heard in the distance?
As ever, wherever you are in the world, my best wishes and have a great weekend.
PS: Almost forgot - ahead of the launch of my own new leadership blog, I am blogging over at b5 to gain additional experience, do come over and leave me a comment:Leadership Turn
