May I be direct?
Your service is not excellent. Your offer is not unique. You are much like the rest of us – struggling to make sense of commerce and fighting the same demons. (The past few months of testing service and sales response levels in SA have shown us at Sales Motor how awful almost all of us are.)
Maybe, after a few years of banging your head against the coal face, you will build some great habits that your clients will like enough to give you money for.
Even then, if you tell us how good you are, we will not believe you. The SA government uses the phrase “service excellence” 15,100 times on their websites. In their case it is more hope than real, like my relationship with Cindy Crawford. The phrase now means as much as “Ja nee.”
More than 28,100 SA sites talk about their “unique service”. That too no longer means much. “Eunuch service” would be more truthful.
I think it is time to stop talking so much about it and start doing it a little. Now, that is something people notice. And it is almost easy!
Over this past month some of my clients have made great sales. And a bunch have not. They differ in just one respect: All the clients who get the sales phone back within 30 minutes of a web enquiry.
When a person sends you a request via your website they don’t quite know what to expect next. Folk in SA have lost hope that much will happen. And, indeed, very little does.
In Norway, if you ask a plumber to visit on Monday at 10am, he will arrive between 9:59 and 10:01. In SA, if you ask five of them to visit on Tuesday at 10am, the only guy to arrive, at 1pm on Thursday, will get the job.
So, when a prospect gets a phone call back from a real person, within thirty minutes, there is a stunned silence, often followed by “Fok me, I have NEVER had such service before.” (Women will often say “Wow” instead of the more robust male response.) I know this because we’ve been testing it for the past 12 months.
At this point you do not have to talk about your service. You have just shown it off in all its shining glory. That memory will stick. Folk offering great service don’t have to mention it. The rest of us do.
This past week I helped a few of my clients work through their own sales processes to adjust to doing it this way. Their sales results improved overnight. (When so few folk in SA offer any service at all, it is not hard to stand out!)
We test our clients after a few weeks, to see if their follow-up is any good. At the same time we test the firms competing with them. And the really great news is that they are all so slow, and so bad, that it really is easy to be better.
A fast email is much more efficient, but not nearly as effective. The call starts a dialogue that your prospect needs so that they will trust you enough to give you money. In a world with so much technology we sellers forget that our clients want relationships.
May I suggest that it might be a good idea to be the first in your field to look at this issue, rather than the second?