CHAPTER 12

Accelerating Your Responsiveness

There’s an epidemic of poor responsiveness in sales and service. I’ve known this for a long time as an advisor and consultant to CEOs regarding the sales challenges confronting their companies. What’s taken me by surprise in recent years was the depth of the problem.

The most frequent reaction I’ve heard over the past few years from readers of my first book, Zero-Time Selling, as well as from salespeople who have attended my sales training workshops, was their recognition that their responsiveness was woefully deficient. Most surprising of all were the number of similar comments I’ve received from seasoned, successful, top-grade sales professionals and sales VPs. In many cases, these were people I knew personally, senior sales pros with 30-year track records of sales success in multiple industries, who recognized that they weren’t being completely responsive to their customers.

This epidemic doesn’t afflict just salespeople. An article in the April 25, 2013, issue of the Wall Street Journal reported on an internal IBM video that had been sent to all 430,000 of its employees by CEO Virginia Rometty. In her five-minute missive, Rometty decried the absence of a sense of urgency among her legions in responding to customers. She charged that IBM had not been sufficiently proactive in engaging with its customers to get them answers to their questions. As revealed in the WSJ article, the solution was to change IBM’s process in hopes of changing its culture: “The CEO then unleashed a new rule. If a client has a request or question, IBM must respond within 24 hours.”

By their CEO’s reckoning, IBM was a company that had a responsiveness problem. Even a cohort of some of the best trained and best managed sales and support people in the tech industry, with virtually unlimited resources at their command, who design, sell, manufacture, integrate, and deploy some of the most complex IT systems in the world, was visibly failing at this most basic of skills. Consequently, they were becoming vulnerable to their competitors.

Unfortunately, customers have become conditioned not to expect responsiveness. Many reasons contribute to this. Salespeople and their managers might not recognize how essential responsiveness is to their efforts to build trust and credibility with prospects. Most important, they fail to understand how responsiveness at every stage of the customer’s buying process creates the foundation for true seller differentiation, which leads to a tangible and sustainable competitive advantage.

The mistake sellers make is in assuming that customers don’t place a value on responsiveness. They do. Watch and listen to Virginia Rometty’s message to IBM’s 430,000 employees. She did not decide out of a misplaced sense of altruism to fix a problem that didn’t exist. To the contrary, she was responding to concerns expressed by IBM’s customers that the global behemoth couldn’t keep up.

It’s not just big companies that struggle with poor responsiveness and squander opportunities to win business. Not that long ago, I was shopping online for a particular software service for my company. I spent a few hours researching the alternatives and narrowed my choices to one company’s system that seemed to fit my needs. That company was a mature start-up with a recognizable name.

I had a few questions that required answers before I could make a final purchase decision. I tried to find a phone number for their sales department on the company’s website but they didn’t offer one. So I tracked down an e-mail address for their sales department and submitted a list of five questions. Within an hour I received an e-mail response. At that point I was encouraged. I prefer doing business with like-minded companies. Then I read their response:

Dear Andy,

Thank you for your interest in XXXXXXXXX. We are here to help you. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,
Dan

Sigh. I bought from another company.

Unfortunately, Dan, like too many other salespeople, doesn’t think about responsiveness from the perspective of his prospects and customers.

Chances are good that you compete in a market where it’s extremely expensive to create and maintain any meaningful product differentiation. Innovative products and services are quickly copied and commoditized in a rush to market by a myriad of competitors. As a result, in the eyes of your customers, the product(s) that you sell, as well as those your competitors sell, are perceived to be largely the same. In this environment, then, how do you stand out? How can you reliably distinguish yourself from everybody else?

Responsiveness becomes one of the primary tools you can use to demonstrate to your customer that the experience of working with you and your company is different from the others and, in the process, develop a level of credibility and trust that will result in winning orders. If you value responsiveness, then it will quickly become apparent to your prospect through your actions.

What is the measure of responsiveness? How do you know whether you’re being responsive? Unfortunately, there’s no one answer to this question. The bottom line is that you’re being responsive if your customer believes you are. The danger in this approach is thinking of responsiveness as a fixed target. A business environment is constantly evolving, and the standard of what constitutes adequate responsiveness in the eyes of your prospects and customers is changing even as you read this.

In his famous Supreme Court opinion on obscenity in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart wrote, “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.” Your prospects and customers feel the same way about responsiveness. They can’t give you a precise definition, but they know it when they see it!

That’s not to say you should leave your customers’ perceptions of your responsiveness to chance. You have to take deliberate steps to define your own standard and process of responsiveness and create metrics that enable you to measure your performance and improve your process.

Here are four steps you can take immediately to increase your responsiveness to prospects and customers:

1. Commit to responsiveness as a personal sales priority. There are no good reasons not to prioritize responsiveness. Just bad excuses. It doesn’t require prep work. Just do it. Take the vow today: “My time frame for responding to every customer inquiry, question, or request for help will be immediate.” Responsiveness requires a personal effort. Don’t fool yourself into believing that an auto-generated e-mail to a customer request is responsive. It isn’t; it only contains one of the two required elements of responsiveness. The key to creating sustainable sales-based differentiation is to incorporate complete responsiveness into every step of your selling process.

2. Set personal and company standards. IBM took the right first step by creating a standard measure for responsiveness. I give them credit for putting a stake in the ground. While I believe 24 hours is too long to respond to a customer question, establishing an initial metric against which to measure your responsiveness is a great start. Be sure to share your standards with customers and management. You need that additional accountability that comes from publicly committing to a specific standard of performance.

3. Measure your responsiveness. I apologize for dragging out the old truism that you can’t improve what you don’t measure. But it’s absolutely true. If you’re going to create a metric-based expectation for responsiveness, then you must collect the data to measure. For your personal responsiveness, you can use your CRM system to track this. Or keep a manual diary for a few days to analyze exactly how sharp your responsiveness reflexes are.

4. Refine your process. Every day that goes by, the pressure will be on you to become more responsive. Remember the Andy Paul Uncertainty Principle of Selling from Chapter 10? The customer’s buying process is a living, breathing, changing thing. Much like the changing competitive landscape that will force IBM to keep reducing the amount of time it requires to respond to a customer, you too must continually improve your responsiveness to meet your customers’ requirements. In addition, if you blow away customers with your responsiveness, they will begin to expect it each and every time they interact with you. This third-party accountability is great motivation to keep improving.

Think about it this way: Every hour of the customer’s time that you can save in their buying process accrues to their benefit—and to yours. You will have given them time to invest in other profit-generating activities. Therefore, make certain that you blow customers away with your responsiveness. I’m stunned every time I respond rapidly to a customer inquiry, and the customer is shocked that I called them back at all, let alone so quickly. I try to respond to every lead or question I receive within 30 minutes of receiving it. (Here’s a helpful tip: When I follow up with a customer, I always begin by apologizing for taking so long to respond. It makes the point. And raises the bar for all your competitors.)