Let’s be very clear about something.

Horrible customer service is the fastest way to drive your dreams into bankruptcy.

No amount of whining, whimpering, and halfhearted excuse-making can remedy selfish behavior.

Sure — the late 1990′s brought us the age of “more selling, less service”.  And that certainly sounds logical, right?

After all we are emerging from the worst buying environment in more than eight decades.  It would seem that you need to “get out there” more than ever.

It’s that “Stop being an order taker and start being a whale hunter…”type of sales preaching.

Admit it.  You’ve had a sales manager get “up in your business” telling you that you need more cold calls and more ways to “fill the funnel”.  Right?

And…  your manager if probably right.

Being proactive has never been more in style.

But chasing new customers is the slowest way to grow your business.

It takes massive amounts of time and more times than not doesn’t even work.  You chase.  They stay out of reach.

Somehow the easiest revenue strategy — investing in the relationships you already have — seems to be the solution that we avoid at all costs.

Think about the last time that you actually reached out to an old customer.  You needed something right — more money, a referral, your invoice paid a little faster?

Anything else is just flat out annoying.  It’s a waste of your time.  After all you’ve closed the deal already.  You’re not a babysitter, cheerleader, or someone who let’s people take advantage of them.  Right?

Well guess what?  That plan stinks.

You need to stop whining about not winning and start serving.

When was the last time that you provided an outrageous customer experience?

Not answered a question or returned a phone call within 24 hours.  That’s all considered the bare minimum.

When did you make your customer feel so special and cared for that they became ravenous fans?

Instead we tell ourselves that chasing the next big deal is the right direction.

Maybe it’s because we’re too embarrassed to admit that we just don’t care enough to be the high performer that we pretend to be.

Maybe fixing our service was the answer all along.

Here’s a harsh reality:  We‘re just not tough enough…

On my wall framed hangs the famous inspiration quotation from Vince Lombardi about football and winning and what it takes to be number one.  It’s been on the wall of my office for the past decade.  It’s my own mezuzah to excellence and always pushing the limits of what I think is possible.

Last week as I was working – somewhat puzzled over some frustrating issues – my eye flickered over the glass encased picture.  At the top of the picture underneath the title, in font that was bigger than the rest of the speech by Limbardi, the following words jumped out at me:

You’ve got to pay the price…

Simple words.  A big challenge.

All of a sudden it hit me.  I needed to toughen up a little.  I needed a little more mental discipline.  I was letting my fears destroy my vision.  It reminded me a of story I had been told about a soldier in World War II.

Apparently:

A team of soldiers were fighting inch by inch for a painfully embattled strip of island.  Day after day they fought — losing men and gaining little headway.  Each day their supplies ran lower  and several of the men started getting sick.  The classic symptoms of diarrhea and vomiting would be bad enough if enemy snipers and cleverly booby-trapped minefields weren’t even more dangerous.

Each night, a few brave soldiers would swim back to the battleship anchored two miles off shore to get more supplies and ammunition.  Many never made it back.

In the middle of this sad, miserable jungle, George fought side by side with his band of brothers.  While others became feverishly sick with dysentery, he raised morale with his wit and charisma.  Things seemed to be getting better.  The enemy was being pushed back and the team was alive.  And then things got tough for George.

He became ill.  Very ill.  George got so sick that he could barely move.  As the rockets and mortars crashing overhead as he lay in his foxhole, it seemed like a matter of time until one landed too close.  And then it happened.

George said that you could always tell by the sound of a mortar overhead how close away the round might be.  Your senses perked up when the difference between death and inches is just a few seconds and quick movement.  And in a weakened state, lying pathetically at the edge of a foxhole, George and his partner had little time to move.  The round crashed into the back of the foxhole where George’s partner sat huddled.  The shrapnel completely obliterated George’s partner and gouged deep flesh out of George’s back and buttocks and legs.

Blood soon mixed with diarrhea and infection set in.  George had to get back to the boat or die.  There was no other option.  No one was able to carry him back.  To live, he had to go it alone.

And so when darkness fell, he crawled from his foxhole to the beach and into the saltwater — salt ripping deep into open and raw wounds.  And the unbelievable happened.

George swam the 2 miles back to the boat and lived.  In spite of the odds, in spite of his weakened state, George made it.

And I’m glad he did.  George Waldschmidt was my grandfather.

What kept George alive is the same thing that will help you dominate — mental toughness.

There wasn’t a cheering section waving flags and rooting my grandpa on the last 200 yards.  There wasn’t a friend putting SuperPoke “You can do it” messages on his Facebook page.  And forget about any Tweets with the words “crush it”, “good job” or “best of luck”.

It was icy water, diarrhea and deep wounds, infectious fever, and a ravenous determination to live.

Mental toughness is a process of muscle growth like physical exercise.  There is NO magic potion.  You have to intensely focus on a few key repeatable exercises.  Here are a few of them:

1. Avoid the need to blame others for anything. — Mean, small-minded people know that they suck.  That’s why they are so cranky and eager to point out your mistakes.  They hope that by causing you to feel inadequate, everyone will forget about how woefully off-the-mark their own performance is.  Stop the habit of blaming anyone for any reason ever.  It’s a bad habit.
2. Stop working on things that just don’t matter. — Not everything needs to be done in place of sleep.  If you work for a boss, then you owe them solid time.  You can’t cut that out.  You can however cut out the television time, board meetings, and anything else that gets in the way of you staying focused on your destiny.  Replace entertainment with activity toward your goal.
3. Find the positive side of any circumstance.  It’s there. — Find a negative person and you’ve found a mentally weak person.  It takes no mental courage to say that something “won’t work.”  Frankly, that’s the easy route.  What does take mental effort (lots of it sometimes…) is to believe in something when you are the only one in your cheering section.  Make it a personal challenge to find the best in every situation.  And tell someone when you find it.
4. Refuse to let yourself wallow in self-doubt.  You’re alive to succeed. – Stop comparing your problems to your last 18 failures.  They are not the same.  You are not the same.  Here’s something to remember: Your entire life has been a training ground for you capturing your destiny right now.  Why would you doubt that?  Go conquer.  Stop whining.
5. Ask yourself “what can I do better next time?” and then do it next time. — Guess what?  Spend a decade or two earnestly trying to “be better”, and that’s exactly what will happen.  The next best thing to doing something amazing is not doing something that’s stupid.  So learn from your mistakes and use the lessons to dominate.
6. Actively take time to do things that fuel your passion. (e.g. exercise…) – Living in the moment requires you to live at peak performance.  A huge part of mental fitness is physical fitness.  So go fight someone. Or go running.  Mental motivation gets accelerated by physical activity.
7. Say thank-you for something that you have taken for granted in the past. — The exercise of gratitude is a powerful ignitor of creativity.  Selfishness limits our ability to work at peak performance.  When you think only of yourself, you miss out on the real key to world domination — help other people.
8. Apologize to yourself and those around you for having a bad attitude. — Do this once or twice and you’ll snap out of your funk pretty fast.  When you start having to genuinely apologize for being a bad influence on those around you, you learn to stop whining and start winning.

The quickest way to fail is to let your fears and doubts get in the way of your passion.  It’s what happens naturally.  If you want to dominate, control your thought, young Jedi.  You’ll find yourself conquering more.

Two stories.

One central theme.

It all started on Friday with a call from my friend, Jill Stelfox…

The Bad Movie

Between a mix of tears and laughing she told me how she had been working to secure a vendor to tape video footage of one of her clients.  Her client is a financial planner who is on MSNBC as a leading source of “money talk” and so she wanted to get a copy of all his appearances to add to his website.  (Sounds like a good plan to me…) So she reached out to several different vendors who quoted her prices between $125 to $150 per tape clip.  One vendor though struck a different tone.  He offered to provide the service at $85 per clip – provided she bought 25 up-front – and even suggested he send her a sample of her client on video.

Pleased, Jill provided more information, and a short bit later the vendor sent over the video.  After looking at the tape Jill called the vendor with a serious problem — the audio and video were synced horribly like a bad Chinese Kung Fu movie.  Jill’s client was talking and his lips were moving “out of timing” with the audio.  The video quality itself was “super spotty”.  Still — this was a FREE sample.  Maybe there was a good explanation (or not).

The vendor listened as Jill spoke and then professionally admitted that there was a problem.  He then went on to note that he “knew there was a problem and that was why he was asking for 25 up-front purchases – so he could upgrade his equipment”… (all true, I promise).  He then went on tell Jill that “he was broke and needed the money to do more work for other prospects.”

It took little time for Jill to hang up the phone in disbelief and end a shockingly bizarre buying experience.

Stolen Shoes

Saturday evening Sara and I were “first person” to our own outrageous buying experience.  It went a little something like this:

There is an children’s arcade/amusement center called Frankie’s Fun Park about 10 minutes from our house in Greenville that my two boys (Bryce and Dustin) love for me to take them.  I just went there a few weeks ago when Sara was out-of-town and found the scene morbidly un-engaging.  Employees were frowning and yawning –  like we customers were a chore that they were forced to take care of.   Needless to say, I took the boys home without spending any more money.  I also took the 15.4 seconds necessary to “tweet” to the world about my poor experience.  And then told the boys that we would never be heading back there again…

But, alas, the allure of winning tickets and climbing through indoor jungle gyms was too much for the boys to accept.  They wanted to return and I wanted to make that happen for them.  Besides, Bryce had won almost 2,000 tickets that he had not cashed in for prizes yet.  And so we made our way back into the den of sweaty over-caffeinated kid-dom.

The boys headed straight for the “jungle gym”.  Shoes off and stowed in cubby.  Borrowed socks on.  Fun everywhere with mom and dad cheering on the mayhem (I wish they made one of those for adults…).  It was when the boys got out that the problem began.  Dustin (my 2 year old) had his bright yellow crocs stolen out of his cubby — cubby that his mom and I were standing 5 feet away from the entire night.  Sure — someone might have accidentally picked up the bright yellow crocs by accident (hardly….) — but it was the way the employees handled it that made this a story.

Of course I mentioned this to the 17- year old staff member in that kids area who took a few seconds away from texting to look at me with one eye raised.  ”Steal your kids shoe?” she repeated back to me incredulously — like I was making the entire story up for.  Further outraged, I moved on to the front of the establishment to look for management.  Maybe someone old enough to have a car payment would care about my son’s bright yellow crocs.  Sadly I was mistaken.

When I reached the front desk the manager came hustling out to meet me, chattering in half-tones into an ear piece about some food cleanup.  Without any eye contact, he briefly stopped to tell me that he had “everyone looking for my shoe and that he was sure no one had stolen my sons’s bright yellow crocs.”  To which I kindly refrained from sucker punching him in his face and left with Sara and the boys.  I came to spend money and was left shoeless and insulted.  Another horrible customer experience at an establishment that should be completely focused on user satisfaction.

What’s the point?

It’s simply this.

It’s all about the EXPERIENCE your customers are having!  You can’t explosively grow your revenue when you are pissing off the people who have the revenue to help you grow.  You invest in them FIRST so that they will invest in you FOREVER.

And remember – It’s not about their trial period

…………………………or your proof-of-concept expectations

………………………………….or the support ROI you are factoring

…………………………………………..or “who is right” when a prospect complains.

It’s about how a prospect FEELS while interacting with you.  Michael Ports (what a great author…) made the observation that: “Long after people forget what you said or did, [customers] will remember how you made them feel.”

It’s feelings that we need to change.  Not facts!

By the way, that means that logic or facts have nothing to do with this discussion.  At the heart of this is the concept of “relationships” — which happen to be completely illogical.  You can’t build a spreadsheet around a customer experience strategy or “doing the right thing” (which is why so many companies just hire more schmucky sales dudes to find more prospects rather than get religious about creating an outrageous experience for their “community”).

You can’t even explain how you are going to make more money doing this.  But it works.  It’s the stuff of legends.

• It’s the pricing and staffing economics that make Southwest Airlines the only profitable airline in the US and the most enjoyable (non-luxury) traveling experience….
• It’s what takes the idea of outrageous customer fulfillment and ten years of consistent performance to build a billion dollar online site like Zappos…
• It’s the detailed online client “do-it-yourself” tools that catapult a small franchise like Washington  Mutual into a leading insurance powerhouse…
• It’s the efficiency of client  purchases and delivery that propel Amazon.com to be the leader in online purchases…
• It’s the foundation of an ACE Hardware franchise that continues to “delight” even while getting smashed by larger Home Depot and Lowe’s franchises…

It’s easy to call this “too intangible for action” and just add more dollars to the CRM budget next year.  This takes guts. And faith.  And obsessing about the details of everything you do and every word you train your people to say.  It is a religion.

But “strangely”, when you invest in your customer’s experience, you emerge as the alpha-standard.  You don’t just improve mediocrity.  You set the standard for the new “impossible”.  You are invincible!

Your ability to achieve explosive revenue growth is directly proportional to your obsession with providing an outrageous customer experience.  Suck at one and you’re guaranteed to suck at the other… (DEWism)

Value Please!

A lot of sales people bring no value to the marketplace.  They take!

They bother us with their nonsense about “you can trust me more” and “I’m not here to sell you anything”.

That type of “selling” is the fingernails-on-the-chalk-board approach to getting a customer’s attention.  It’s the BS that makes the good guys look like schmucks.  It’s professional mediocrity and all of here at The DEW View are on a mission to fight it.

The “pay it forward” sale process understands that “qualified giving” before getting is the only way to build consistent high-value clients.  You can’t replace a “Pay it Forward” philosophy with fake Zig Ziglar closes. (OUCH – apologies if you like the Zig-man).  It’s a mindset that trumps just about any other high-achieving, high return-on-investment activity that you do.

Here are some “Pay it Forward” ideas:

1. Give away 30 minutes a day of your time to mentorships…
2. Write an article about recent trends in your industry and what that means…
3. Call your top 20 clients with a way to save them money…
4. Do the research for your customer that shows the value of your services…
5. Overwhelm presentees with crafty facts that they can repeat to their peers…
6. Host a webinar where you showcase the 12.5 leading problems that your customers need to avoid…
7. Suggest a (non-competing) industry partner your customer needs to meet…
8. Learn the top 3 frustrations of your target customer…

There are other great ways to “pay it forward” in sales without foolishly donating time to non-buyers.  The key is that doing these actions is more than just the action — it is a philosophy of salesmanship.  Also note that each of these activities actually advances your selling process.

————

On another tangent, I am pleased that so many people find this blog helpful in generating more business.  I started it with a “pay it forward” idea of putting in writing some of the thoughts that made me successful in closing big deals.  In the coming days, I am taking this even further AND I WANT YOU TO BE A PART OF IT…

Launching in JUNE will be the Sales Matters group (a mini social network group).  It will be a place:

1. for me to share sales tips like what you read here with entrepreneurs…
2. for me to help you close the big deals that you currently working on…
3. for sales guys to find a better job and a better future…
4. where bosses can find great sales people to hire…
5. where “revenue generators” can find other like-minded people…

I am on this incredible journey leading great people to even greater sales performance and I look forward to you joining me when the site opens…

Expect to hear more common sense talk about generating explosive revenue growth like the following:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbunW1hS9CM]

less NOISE = more SALES

I put this presentation together about 6 months ago for an internal presentation to our team about the need to create a compelling message in spite of all the NOISE surrounding our business.

After recent sales discussions with entrepreneurs, I thought it made sense to share this with The DEW View community.  Its worth reviewing your “sales pitch” while asking yourself the question: “Do I cut through the noise?”

[slideshare id=971464&doc=what-was-your-name-1233326311079577-1]

To really harness EXPLOSIVE revenue performance, you have to create a message that is compelling enough to cut through the NOISE of:

• Your competition…
• Your prior performance…
• Your customer’s perceptions…
• Your personal deficiencies…
• Your customer’s personal agenda…
• Your recent commute to work…
• Your fears about not “closing the deal”… AND
• a squigillion other variables you’ll learn about after you lose a few deals because you didn’t plan for cutting through the NOISE…

Winners create a fanfare that arouses action, intensifies urgency, and capture the mind and motivation of a buyer. (DEWism)

Be a winner!