CHAPTER 38

Selling and Service

In sales, we tend to categorize our customers as being in one of two states. They are in either a presale state or a postsale state. Salespeople have been conditioned to believe that responsibility for the customer shifts from sales to customer service once a customer gives you an order and moves from the presale state to the postsale state. Most of this book is focused on what salespeople should do during the traditional presale state.

As much as I have attempted to change your perceptions of what selling and buying are, I also want to change your perception of the role and responsibility of sales in servicing customers.

Let’s start with the whole presale/postsale divide. I don’t believe that a customer is ever in a postsales state. If managed appropriately, customers should be in a perpetual presales mode. After all, companies provide a high level of customer service not out of an altruistic sense of mission, but rather because they want to capture the customer’s next order. And the one after that. And so on.

That’s why when a customer calls your customer support group, it shouldn’t be written off as a service call. Instead, every call to support should be considered a sales call for the customer’s next order. How you, the salesperson, support a postsale customer will have a significant influence on the customer’s next purchase.

Suddenly you are in the realm where actions speak louder than words. The nineteenth-century American essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson provided words that should guide the actions of salespeople in servicing their customers: “What you do speaks so loudly I cannot hear what you say.

My first job in sales was with a major computer company whose CEO had the customer service philosophy that “We want to keep our customers surly, but not rebellious.” True story. Our customers heard us loud and clear. I wish I could say that they limited themselves to being surly.

Sales made its own contribution to the mess. Long-held traditions in the sales bullpen dictated that phones were never answered after 4:55 P.M.—especially on Friday. It was bound to be a panicked customer whose system had crashed right when they were processing payroll checks for their employees. They needed assistance. Unfortunately, customer service turned off their phones even earlier on Friday.

All of which was just fine with the CEO. He felt that the solution to every problem was to sell the customer more computing equipment. Unsurprisingly, this did not prove to be a sustainable strategy.

That type of conscious disdain for your own customers has been thoroughly discredited. Few companies even attempt it. Even fewer do it and survive. The empowered customer of this Internet era holds most of the cards, and ferociously competitive markets force companies to compete on the basis of their customer service as well as their products.

What is the role of salespeople in providing customer service after the sale?

First, keep in mind that selling never stops. Even though customers’ attention may be focused on implementation versus acquisition, they’re counting on you to continue to provide additional insights about how to maximize the return on investment in your product.

It takes discipline to continue to curate and supply customers with valuable content after they place their order. In fact, you want to train your customers that communications from you deliver value. You want to maintain those Google alerts you established before getting the order. Send e-mails to customers with links to white papers and articles to let them know that you are continuing to think about their business and how you can be of service to them.

You’ll have two distinct goals in these communications. First, you want to provide information that reinforces your customers’ conviction that they made the right decision to purchase your product. Second, you want to begin to educate customers about what lies ahead of them in terms of the next purchase decision they’ll have to make about your products. (A number of sales engagement tools make it easy for you to collect and store your content, communicate it to customers, and track their engagement with the content you provided.)

Another best practice for servicing customers is to publish a newsletter or other form of structured communication with your existing customers.

Remember that you are no longer just a salesperson. You are an expert. You are a trusted advisor. Your customers have invested in you once. However, that is not the end game. The end game is their continued investment in you. Now that you have set the bar by winning an order, how do you raise it to win the customer’s next order? The answer is by working together to help the customer earn an even bigger return on her investment.

Two well-known account management strategies provide this service to customers. They provide distinct opportunities for you to help your customers earn a much bigger return on investment than they originally forecasted. One is called Fit In and Stand Out. The other is called Land and Expand.

Fit In and Stand Out. Dr. Seuss said, “Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” Fortunately, in sales it is not an either/or proposition.

You know that selling is about change. The change doesn’t need to be big or transformative. Sometimes it’s an incremental improvement for a particular customer function or process. For instance, assume that AXs, Inc. purchases your product to replace an existing and aging communication system. A condition of the sale requires that your product seamlessly integrate with AXs’ existing processes and equipment. This integration is the Fit In part of the equation.

Once your product is successfully operational and delivering the value that you projected, you’ll begin to educate the customer about how other companies have implemented your product to achieve even greater process improvements or cost savings. Help your customers realize a better return on the investment they have already made in your product by showing them how to use it more productively in order to generate incremental revenues, profits, or cost savings, and you will have provided a real service. That is the Stand Out part of the equation.

Land and Expand. Every customer has an ROI justification for purchasing your product. In this scenario, your task is to help the customer find additional uses of your product beyond the original business justification that will deliver incremental revenues and profits.

I worked for a company that sold a network connectivity product that replaced expensive telephone landlines. Part of our qualification criteria was that customers could realize a return on the full investment in the short term and had the longer-term potential to generate incremental return through the expanded use of our product.

We prospected for customers who could justify the entire cost of our system by replacing the most expensive 10 percent of their network sites (Land). Consequently, their incremental costs to replace the next most expensive 10 percent were substantially smaller. In this way, we could incrementally expand the usage of our product while continuing to reduce the unit cost to our customer (Expand).

The role of the salesperson in a Land and Expand service role is to find additional uses of your product for the customer beyond the original business case. Imagine your strategy as a target. Initially you will focus your efforts with the customer on the bull’s-eye. When the opportunities in the bull’s-eye are exhausted, then you shift your focus to the next ring out. And so on.

Remember, you are a trusted advisor to your customers. You’ve been proactive in helping them optimize their use of your product in order to achieve their business goals and maximize their ROI in your product. Your suggestions concerning how they can expand the uses of your product either to generate additional sales, increase margins by decreasing costs, or improve profitability by sharing the cost of your product among multiple cost centers are a real service.