Author name: B-More Consulting

Few things are more frightening for a sales professional than an angry customer! But like all scary things, fuming customers are less intimidating if you have an effective, proven process to address and defuse their anger. Here are six tips to deal effectively with angry customers: 1. Start with the right frame of mind. Don’t take their anger personally, and understand they just want to be heard and helped. 2. Use LAER to understand the issue and defuse their anger. Carew sales training graduates will recall that LAER (Listen ▪ Acknowledge ▪ Explore ▪ Respond) is a key strategy for overcoming customer objections. It is equally effective for understanding and defusing customer anger. The mere act of venting and airing concerns will go a long way in defusing the customer’s pent up frustration. 3. Take notes. During the Acknowledge step of LAER, you will use verbal and non-verbal forms of acknowledgement (nods, “yes,” “I understand”). Taking notes is a terrific demonstration of acknowledgement and will help you accurately recall important details later. 4. Take a moment to apologize to your customer. It’s surprising how often this simple, but crucial, step is forgotten. It is also a natural transition from your Acknowledge step to the Solution step, and it shows that you are taking responsibility for the issue/problem. 5. Follow up. Circle back around with your customer a day or two after the problem is resolved to assess your customer’s satisfaction with the solution, as well as his or her overall frame of mind. At this point, you can assess whether additional action or management involvement is needed to fully restore the customer’s satisfaction. 6. Analyze and correct. What is viewed as a problem for one customer will likely be problematic for all customers. Take time to trace the problem to its origin, understand how it occurred and fix the root cause to prevent a recurrence, or worse, a proliferation of the issue. Angry customers concern us because we fear the relationship, or the business, could be at risk. However, if we address a customer’s anger in the appropriate manner (demonstrating our concern, dedication and effectiveness), the process can actually improve the long-term customer relationship!

Ten years ago, Danish toymaker LEGO was experiencing double digit losses annually, and was at risk of debt default. A decade later, in 2015, the company reported a 25% increase in revenues and a 31% jump in profits. How’d that happen? That’s the question answered by branding expert and best-selling author Martin Lindstrom in his recent article for LinkedIn Pulse. Lindstrom was retained by LEGO in 2004 to understand and reverse the company’s downward spiral. At the time, LEGO had reams of “big data” that concluded that LEGO had no future, due to the exploding popularity of video games and millennials’ desire for instant gratification and more excitement than building blocks could provide. That dismal outlook changed dramatically the day LEGO marketers talked to an eleven-year-old boy in Germany. What they thought they knew, based on interpretations of “big data,” was completely wrong. Only by exploring with their young customer to understand his passions, needs and motivations were LEGO leaders able to develop a vision, and map a path to success. Considered one of the world’s foremost branding gurus, Lindstrom is known for recognizing big implications and opportunities in the smallest of details. Often, those “details” come from exploratory conversations or observation to uncover consumers’ true purchase motivations. And while LEGO’s story is remarkable, it will not be surprising to those who have experienced the power of the Exploratory Process and effective listening practices as a means of driving successful sales outcomes. Read Lindstrom’s complete article here: LEGO engineered a remarkable turnaround of its business. How’d that happen?

Every day, we utilize the communication and relationship-building skills we learned in Dimensions of Professional Selling (DPS) sales training to drive our sales effectiveness with customers and prospects. But if we limit application of these skills only to our professional lives, we may be missing out! Here are just a few examples of how your DPS skills will enhance your personal life: Odds Are – When you return home at the end of your day, who gets to go first talking about their day? Do you show the appropriate amount of interest in hearing details from others, or do you just wait for your turn to talk about your day? LAER – Spouse mad at you? Use LAER to defuse his/her anger and gain a complete understanding of the issue and his/her needs and motivations. Practicing LAER at home can get you out of the dog house today and prevent future occurrences down the road. It’s also not a bad way to model the behavior you’d like in return. GAP Analyses – This is a terrific tool for teens, or anyone who has a tendency to think in terms of immediate need, versus broader, strategic goals. For example, say your daughter wants to go hang out at her boyfriend’s house where you’re not sure if any adults will be home. After exploring to confirm her desired outcome of spending time with him AND staying in your good graces, see if other alternatives would satisfy all her goals: coming to your house, going to the mall, or hanging out at Starbucks. Diamond Presentation Process – Its simplicity makes it a terrific tool for teens to use in their class presentations. Teaching them to end their key statements with a Benefit statement that connects to their audience’s “desired outcome” will help make that high-impact connection they’re looking for and possibly ace the assignment. For once, you may lend advice that your teenager actually uses! JADIK Matrix – This is such a powerful tool for improving the quality of challenging relationships, whether it’s your imposing mother-in-law or a “difficult” peer at work. Working on expanding the Common Ground will improve the relationship, reduce conflict, and facilitate cohesion. DPS participants often share how the tools and practices they learn in DPS sales training also improve their personal relationships. Leveraging these practices in your personal life will also sharpen your skills for better application on the job.

Trust. It\’s a powerful word. Sales professionals know that in order to build and maintain the kind of interdependent customer relationships that drive success, they must first earn their customers\’ trust. In his article, \”How to Build Customer Trust: 9 Rules,\” author Geoffrey James, offers tips to help build client relationships that are based on a foundation of trust. Below is a summary: Be yourself. Don\’t go into a sales meeting acting/sounding like a sales person. Be conversational, and treat the meeting as if you are talking with a client. Value the relationship. Truly believe in the fact that the client relationship is important and that you have something of value to offer your client. Be curious about people. Customers are drawn to sales professionals who show interest in them. Curiosity also provides you with the opportunity to learn new things about your client and make new connections. Be consistent. Do what you say you will do, and be persistent with it. Giving your client the chance to be able to predict your behavior will make him or her more likely to trust you. Seek the truth. Your sales strategy should be based on your genuine interest in finding the right solution for your client\’s needs (GAP). Working on discovering the solution together can result in the emergence of trust. Keep an open mind. Show your client that you\’ve got his or her best interest at heart by being open to other solutions. Have a real dialog. Keep the meeting conversational in nature, and most importantly,listen to your customer. Don\’t just present a sales pitch or chit-chat with him or her. Focus on discussing real business issues. Be a professional. Show that you are serious about what you do, and take the time to learn everything you can about your client and his or her industry. Show real integrity. Never promise what you can\’t deliver, and be willing to show decisiveness and take a stand on what you believe is the right solution. Following these 9 tips can help sales professionals experience the full power of trust in their customer relationships, which is the foundation of long-term sales success.

Reviewed by: Ed Albertson, Partner, Carew International At first glance, it might seem like a stretch to recommend to a business audience this book by a liberal social scientist and psychology professor. But author Johnathan Haidt is not a partisan with an agenda, and his book, The Righteous Mind, simply uses American politics to illustrate much broader insights about the nature of morality and its profound impact on our motivations and behaviors. The parallels between political processes and the business of sales, marketing, branding and buying are all too striking (and fascinating) to ignore. On the surface, The Righteous Mind appears to explain how and why people can possess such divided views on politics and religion despite their shared cultural foundations. However, upon exploring the chapters and sections of the book, business readers will recognize illuminating research and unexpected findings that help explain 1) basic human behavior and decision-making, including how much we all rely on self-deceiving intuition over rational strategies, 2) diverse perspectives and the barriers that can subvert understanding and hinder cooperation, and 3) how we can transcend self-interest and achieve cooperation through awareness of our differences and a search for our common ground. An example of Haidt\’s contribution to business practitioners: \”Intuitions come first: strategic reasoning second.\” Understanding the dynamic tension between our conscious reasoning and our gut reactions provides us with new and valuable insight on how we can better persuade others who seem unresponsive to facts and logic. Imagine what a productive talent this is for sales professionals, negotiators and business leaders! There is great potential to readers to improve communication skills, increase negotiating effectiveness, and enhance leadership strategies through Haidt’s informative and entertaining road-map of moral psychology. The Righteous Mind is a righteous read!

Thousands of hours spent with sales professionals and sales leaders reveals a central challenge to sales effectiveness: our failure to distinguish between “urgent” and “important”. This relates to customer issues, as well as our own internal organization issues, with the inclination to devote too much time and energy to urgent. We all agree that urgent matters are unavoidable; as we know “stuff” happens. These problems are usually tactical, logistical or some prisoner-of-the-moment issue. Important issues are strategic in nature. For example, extinguishing a fire is urgent; preventing fires is important. One can also see that time spent on the important issues will prevent urgent issues down the road. And so it goes in the sales profession. A personnel change at your client can create a crisis. Networking within the client organization to create broader, deeper and more engaged relationships with decision makers and influencers is important, and may prevent vulnerability when your contact leaves the client organization. What keeps us mired down in urgent matters? We often lack, or don’t use, strategic sales practices that can prevent many emergencies. Secondly, we lack confidence (driven by a lack of selling skills), that enables sales professionals to function in a more strategic capacity. Third may be pure habit or the adrenaline rush provided by urgent problem solving. While putting out fires can be very stressful, success in doing so provides instant gratification. This feeling of accomplishment comforts the sales professional whose skills to function as a strategic partner are not well developed. Urgent issues are often easy – addressed immediately, in a single day, with a phone call, and they have the sales professional saving the day both internally and externally. Important solutions require extensive thought, energy, networking, research and insight. Important endeavors require precise communication and interpersonal skills, as well as stellar diagnostic and exploratory skills, and the ability to make effective presentations. Having a significant network with trusting relationships is not only necessary, it’s essential. If we don’t fully understand the operational dynamics of our client’s organization, we won’t be able to proactively identify potential problems within that organization. If we don’t understand our client’s industry and competition, we can’t offer solutions that create competitive advantage. Ask yourself this simple question: Am I a strategic resource to my customers and my company because I put out big fires? Or do I deliver value to my customers by creating competitive advantage for them and never viewing my product/service or theirs as a commodity? Take off your fire helmet and start understanding what’s IMPORTANT TO YOUR CLIENTS.

There is no challenge in the professional world more prolific than that of our overstuffed work days. In his recent article  for Forbes, Peter Bregman, author of the bestselling time management book, 18 Minutes, points out that \”we start every day knowing we are not going to get it all done. So how we spend our time is a key strategic decision.\” Here are 5 time management tips for improved productivity and sales effectiveness: 1. Start with a Daily Plan. Take a few minutes at the start of every day (even before you dive into email) to consider what will make this day productive and successful. Bregman writes, \”By taking a strategic step back, you can set priorities for your day and determine what will make your precious time most rewarding.\” 2. Put it on the Calendar. Take those most important things you just identified, write them down, and then schedule them into time slots. \”There\’s a tremendous amount of evidence that…if you really want to do something, you have to decide when and where you will do it,\” writes Bregman, asserting that making a list or having a vague sense of intent is not deliberate enough. 3. Tackle Hardest, Disliked Items First. Procrastination is among the most detrimental time management flaws and is often prompted by tasks we dislike. Make it a rule that you cannot dive into other tasks until you have finished the dreaded task (like when your mom made you eat your vegetables before you could have dessert). Tackle them early in the day when you are fresh and have more energy. 4. Learn to Say \”No.\” The work may be infinite, but our time is not. Learn to distinguish between urgent and important tasks, and then give important tasks the priority (see Start with a Daily Plan). Use this insight to guide which requests you will accommodate (and in what time frame) and which you will decline. 5. Review and Refocus. Every hour or two, stop for a moment to assess whether you spent your last hour (or two) productively. Identify where you made the most progress and where you wasted time, and utilize that insight moving forward. If you have drifted off task, these mental check-ins will prompt you to refocus on your strategic goals of the day. There are many different ways to address time management, but if you don\’t really understand why time management is important, even the best tips and tools won\’t help. Time management isn\’t just about time; its true objective is to focus your time on the most important, high impact activities as a means of maximizing your effectiveness and overall success.

Continuing our series, Be Your Best in the New Year, this week we address those habits that are most annoying to customers, and therefore are most detrimental to your sales efforts and overall professional success: 1. Lack of Follow Through – Nothing erodes a customer’s trust and confidence more quickly than a sales professional who over-promises and under-delivers. The rule here is simple: do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you are going to do it. Certainly, we have all experienced situations in which something unexpected happened that prevented us from delivering to a customer as planned. But typically, individuals who operate in “over-promising” mode, do so on a regular basis, and customers and team members alike recognize this trait pretty quickly. 2. Not Listening – The importance of listening is addressed extensively in Carew’s DPS sales training, because listening allows us to better understand the customer’s needs and develop a superior solution. On a more basic level, a failure to listen reflects a lack of interest in, and respect for, the customer’s perspective, experience and insight; and that is extremely off-putting to the customer. 3. Tardiness – Keeping a customer (or anyone) waiting is the most blatant display of disrespect for his or her time. The dynamic of the customer-sales professional relationship makes tardiness on the part of the sales person all the more offensive. Yes, things happen – traffic, weather, delayed flights. Build in extra time, and build a reputation for being the sales pro who arrives early. 4. Bait-and-Switch Customer Care – Customers find it infuriating when a sales professional’s availability, attention and responsiveness take a dramatic dive once the contract is signed. The sales professional may not be manufacturing or delivering goods/services, but he or she can still return customers’ calls, answer their questions and address their concerns. Sales professionals who turn their backs on customers as soon as the deal is done will never cultivate productive, long-term customer relationships. The common denominator in all of these bad habits? They all reflect a lack of respect for customers—their time, their perspective or their level of importance. In contrast, a hallmark of the most successful sales professionals is their ability to make their customers feel extremely important, cared for and valued; in other words, the absence of the above behaviors.

It is universally acknowledged that an optimistic outlook is preferable to a pessimistic one, but few of us fully appreciate the prolific and tangible benefits of optimism. When compared to their pessimistic counterparts, optimists enjoy: More professional success Greater success in personal relationships Improved physical health Better mental health Increased life span Superior coping skills during times of stress or hardship What is it about an optimistic mindset that drives professional success? Psychologist and author Martin Seligman, who is considered a leading authority on \”positive psychology,\” asserts that optimists tend to view failures as temporary setbacks, while pessimists view such events as the end of the road. The greater resilience and persistence that accompanies optimism fosters successful outcomes. In addition, upbeat people are simply more pleasant to be around; people seek out their company and enjoy working with them. Consider the impact of these two factors for sales professionals! As for the health benefits of optimism, there are two leading theories. Emotional stress prompts the production of a hormone called cortisol, which has negative health implications. Optimists tend to handle stress better than pessimists, therefore producing less of the hormone. Research also shows that optimists tend to live healthier lifestyles relative to diet and exercise, practicing fewer bad habits. Those who lack an optimistic nature can take heart – Seligman suggests that positive thinking is a habit that can be learned. Here are tips to cultivate your optimism: Keep company with positive people. Zig Ziglar once said, \”You can\’t scratch with the turkeys if you want to fly with the eagles.\” Both optimism and pessimism are contagious. Seek out the company of successful, upbeat people, and avoid pessimists. Monitor your thoughts for negativity. When you notice negative thoughts, stop and look for opportunities to improve your perspective. Have a laugh. Engaging humor can lend perspective and reduce stress in times of duress. Count your blessings. At the end of each day, list the positive events that occurred that day. Our mindset is the foundation upon which all of our business activities and sales efforts are built. Start your New Year with a positive outlook to cultivate success in 2016!  

In the business world, the next two weeks are widely considered the slowest period of the year. But before you write off the coming days as inconsequential, consider the unique opportunities presented this time of year and how you can leverage them: Cultivate Customer Relationships This is the perfect time of year to personally connect with customers; in part, because they are more accessible. While it is true that folks tend to take more personal time during the holidays, they also halt business travel and have fewer meetings and events scheduled at the office. The result is more people answering their phone or accommodating visitors. For these reasons, it may also be the perfect opportunity to catch up and chat with an elusive prospect. Year end is a most appropriate time to thank existing customers for their business and support throughout the year. Cultivate a more personal connection by asking your customers about their plans over the Holiday and New Year. Even if your company sends a Holiday greeting or gift, you should engage key customers in your own personal way. Organize Those “slow” days in your office present the perfect opportunity to take some time and get organized – what a nice gift to yourself for the New Year! Recharge Your Batteries Take advantage of the reduced activity at work and time out of the office to truly relax, unplug, and enjoy yourself. It may feel like an indulgence in the moment, but recharging your batteries over the coming weeks will provide great benefits when you return in January rested, energized and ready to launch a spectacular year!