The sales process is as follows.

1. Customer calls hotline
2. Staff member puts customer at ease
3. Customer details their problem
4. Staff member demonstrates their knowledge
5. Staff member proposes a paid consultation

Every customer interaction should have a Definitive Next Step. In this case, it’s to secure a one-on-one paid consultation.

The consultation pays everyone’s wages.

As often happens in these high-touch environments, the staff members are sympathetic and knowledgeable but lack in sales closing skills.

The greeting is fantastic, but they fall over in needs analysis and closing the sale.

This is a common service fingerprint.

Needs analysis – staff can’t help themselves. They love to impart their knowledge, often at the expense of listening. They go into an expert product spiel mode and bamboozle the customers.

Closing the sale – for this client, it only happened 50% of the time. So they are wasting half of their marketing spend because only 50% of customers are being invited to buy.

There is no need to be afraid of asking a sale. After all, that’s why customers call.

I recently had to contact their customer service about the loyalty program. Here’s the automated response below.

Telling people it will take just over 4 business days to respond is not OK. Yes yes setting realistic expectations. Maybe they are trying to over-deliver? (not as clever as it sounds)

There is no situation where this is acceptable.

Hire the people. Hire them in Parramatta, Philippines or Palmerston North. Just get some warm bodies on the job taking care of the simple enquiries.

Would love to mystery shop them. Maybe I just did.

Some things are plainly unacceptable. I wonder what I’m doing plain wrong in my business?

(Thankfully the store staff are awesome)

One of my relatives sold her house about nine months ago for (at the time) an astonishing $2.5M. But recently, a (mere) acquaintance remarked that she should have held on.

Yah, yah prices have jumped even more, but…..

They don’t know the circumstances.

She sold because she’d bought her dream small home, no longer needing a McMansion. That’s not the point. The timing was perfect for her because it happened. We hear it all the time.

Why didn’t you go for that promotion?
You don’t know me

Why don’t you take over that other company?
You don’t know me

You should buy the Premium product!
You don’t know me

Why didn’t you donate like last year?
You don’t know me.

Why did you have kids so early?
….. you get the point.

We can’t help ourselves. 

Something about ‘sinners and throwing stones’?

Remember, next time you get the urge to judge a customer, employee, or friend; you don’t know them.

Don’t get buffeted. The next time someone challenges you, remember, they don’t know you.

He’s still doing it at 44 years of age.

He was in his 30s when he started training for his 40s, quitting sugar and white flour, among other steps. (another #Keto boy yay). And he works today for what might happen in the finals ten months later.

He doesn’t judge today’s activity by how it feels for the moment. He delays gratification to feel it when it’s ‘done.

Sports can teach us a lot about business. It’s easy to skip the disciplines.

✵ That customer you’re serving today is a pain.
✵ That client request is unreasonable.
✵ Training staff is costly.
✵ Culture building is a low priority.
✵ Measuring service delivery gets in the way.
✵ No one will notice if we spend less on Brand building.
✵ I can always post on LinkedIn next month.

Tom Brady is married to the method, lest he become just another guy with big ambitions. Or we become ordinary companies with scuttled dreams.

Michael Jordan was 1st and last on the practice court. David Beckham was practising crossing a soccer ball before and after everyone else left training.

You get the point.

“The more good behaviours you have, the better things turn out,” Brady has remarked. “It’s just, do people have the discipline to repeat those behaviours? That’s the tricky part.”

This was a big lesson for me. I know the benefits of delayed gratification, but seeing it from a sporting perspective drove it home. 

What does it mean to be inefficient? It implies an opportunity cost. Instead of doing this (exercising), I could have been doing that (eating Doritos).

But giving up something today for unknown future benefit and zero immediate return is not inefficient; it’s an investment.

Philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris argues that we don’t control our choices. As consumers, we are driven to choices of timing with events like Black Friday deals, or post-Christmas sales. We are even driven to the ‘what’ we should buy through clever advertising and social media influencers.

How far does this lack of choice extend? All the way to death.

New research by Dr. Scott Halpern, of the University of Pennsylvania suggests framing can also affect the biggest decision of all. What to do at end of life.

Terminally ill patients are given a choice of life extension (feeding tubes, chemo etc) or comfort care.

1. 1/3 of the patients were offered comfort care as the default tick on an electronic form. And 77% chose comfort care.
2. 1/3 were not given a default. 66% chose comfort care
3. 1/3 were presented with life extension as the default tick box and only 44% chose comfort care.

The default tick impacted an end-of-life decision.

Being ethical, the researchers then explained the randomly assigned defaults yet only 2 of the 132 respondents changed their minds. 

Everyone in sales should remember the impact of subtle signals and framing. Words matter. Presentation matters.

You’ll probably buy the first paint recommended at the hardware store, the first insurance policy offered by an agent, the wine recommended by the sommelier, even the election flyer when it comes to voting.

These subtleties also play out in customer surveys

Subtlety matters.

Earlier in the week, Evie Networks announced it would install EV charging stations at Hungry Jacks fast-food restaurants.

To some people it was a shock.

What?

Where has all this EV stuff come from?
Fast-food and EV’s?

Both things make sense to someone who’s owned an EV for 18 months.

Yeh – They are cheaper to run, are awesome to drive, and it makes sense to have a meal or a coffee while the car fills.

There’s a Tesla supercharger at Canberra McDonalds
An Evie charger at a petrol station in Penrith, and one in Taree
There are #Tesla Superchargers at Coles Cooma
There’s even a Tesla charger after 2km of dirt road to Joadga Gin distillery in the southern highlands of NSW.

This is a complete surprise when I mention it to people. Hungry Jacks? Pfft. Awesome, but normal.

We’re all car drivers, we all use the roads, we even pay the same tolls. But EV owners are in a parallel universe.

What’s normal to one set of consumers is foreign to others.

This is more than just personas and customer avatars. All customers occupy a different universe.

A business traveller sees the hotel room different to a holidaymaker.
An investor sees a house different to an owner-occupier.
A nurse sees a deep cut as mundane, while you see it as life-threatening.
One group sees something as mundane and normal; the other may not even know of its existence.

Employees deploy industry jargon and assumed knowledge beyond the comprehension of consumers.

We often see this in our #mysteryshopping when designing programs, and this is where external providers/consultants can help. Yes, you’d rather save the money and do things yourself, but then you don’t see what others see.

Wait until consumers catch on that there are no car servicing costs for #EV. 

Here’s a frequent conversation.

Friend: How much does it cost to service your electric car?
Me: Zero, Zilch, nada, there’s no servicing.
Friend:

No one’s normal is normal.

Just because you are the boss doesn’t mean your team will blindly follow your instructions. You can spot signs that your staff members are rebelling against you in the workplace. But don’t use surveys. Surveys don’t work.

10 reasons why staff surveys don’t work

1. Staff surveys are usually poorly designed by amateurs.
2. Staff surveys are a lag indicator – you need to design, distribute and collate them.
3. Staff either lie because they fear they’ll somehow be ousted (positive bias).
4. Some staff may have an axe to grind (negative bias).
5. Staff can feel interrogated and defensive. (“You’re the boss, you work it out!”)
6. They don’t give you insight into what is going on beneath the surface, their feelings on their job security, leadership, quality of supervision and company policies.
7. You have to be careful about asking too many questions. This can make people feel interrogated and defensive.
8. Staff surveys are boring for employees.
9. Staff surveys take staff away from their work.
10. The results are ‘interpreted’ incorrectly.

You don’t need surveys to tell you, the staff leave breadcrumbs all over the store. Try observing. These observations don’t focus on an individual, but the whole team.

Sometimes the manager can spot the problems such as staff not wanting to participate in team-building or activities that are all hands on deck related.

Staff talking behind the customers’ backs can also be a bellwether to problems.

But these are subtle and require an insider to spot them, and the insider (manager) might also be poisoned.

But you can find the breadcrumbs through external observation.

12 breadcrumbs which measure culture

1. General untidiness such as rubbish bins (trash) in common areas not emptied.
2. Not wearing uniforms correctly.
3. Not pitching in to help each other.
4. Talking at the counter among themselves while customers roam the store.
5. General lack of speed/urgency when it’s busy.
6. Frequent stumbling blocks to customer problem-solving.
7. Not doing the ‘little things’ with conviction.
8. Going through the motions with their greeting.
9. Answering a question without explanation or expansion (“Buy this” V “Buy this because”).
10. Not closing a sale (“Can I take that to the counter for you?).
11. Not cross-selling (“You know what would go really great with that steak/dress/computer…?”).
12. Not following up with a customer when they promised to.

Someone not working at the store/branch can spot these issues. Even if they are a visiting regional manager. Or you could employ mystery shoppers, not to measure the service, but to gauge the culture.

I’ve got a customer yelling at a staff member. The staff member is giving as good as he gets with a passive-aggressive smirky tone that’s winding the customer even more. Other customers are looking on. Everyone is triggered.

My Apple watch is beeping with a warning that my own heart rate is elevated.

At the same time, everything goes into slow motion. Time freezes.

How did it come to this? I never want this to happen again.

We’ve done all the training, all the procedures have been written. We’ve even written a policy on how to respond, how to stand (non-aggressively), and how to escalate (to a manager). 

Some of my staff silkily swerve through conflict, while others bombastically berate their ‘opponents’.

Why can’t this employee just snap into line?

They can’t.

We assume people can ‘control’ their emotions and how they react. We believe people can ‘choose’ to act a certain way.

But as author Lisa Feldman Barret explains in her book Seven and a Half Lessons About The Brain, we don’t really have as much free will as we think – a view shared by neuroscientist and author Sam Harris.

We are shaped by our culture and our experiences. As Seth Godin likes to say:

People like this do things like that.

It’s a big adjustment to know how to deal with a different skin colour when you’re bought up in a small homogenous town.

It’s not easy for a kid who’s dragged themselves out of poverty to listen to whining privileged snotty customer with 1st world problems.

Deep down, we understand this, but we think people can turn off their ‘being’ when they’re at work.

Automatic actions

We act automatically in most circumstances. Just like we retract a finger from a burning stove, a screaming customer could cause a similar employee reaction. An employee who doesn’t understand (experience or learnt) how to deal with that situation will revert to how they deal with the problems in their personal life.

If the employee is from a rough neighbourhood, they may respond with aggression. Or, they might react to attack with calm because they know aggression might get them killed. It depends on the environment they’ve experienced in life. Did they have parents to guide them? Did they have someone harmed by violence? These experiences will shape them more than a procedures manual.

Uncontrollable events create uncontrollable events.

So what do you do?

Our brains are in a constant state of pruning and tuning. A blind person prunes neurones related to sight and tunes the ones related to sounds. The brain’s plasticity means it’s constantly changing its physiology based on its environment.

Learning and experiences shape minds.

Anyone who has travelled knows how much it changes you. Someone who hasn’t travelled will never know. Someone who has had a child knows the profundity of birth. Someone who’s been incarcerated knows what it means to suffer.

The more experiences we have, the more we adjust.

It’s not the fault of the poor kid from a homogenous background that they react to their antagonistic customer. It’s not the customer’s fault who’s been fleeced by a business partner while their husband cheated on them. 

It’s not the fault of a poor child that they didn’t get to experience travel. But a guide can ‘share’ their experiences.

Don’t ‘blame’ poor behaviour. Understand it. 

Don’t correct their way; show them the way.

People are in constant search of mentors and guides. You don’t have to be a sandal-wearing navel-gazing guru sitting in a dark cave; just lead with an open hand. Show another way. Show by example. Lead with an open hand.

What do you do?

What you don’t do is reach for every pill and syrup in your medicine cabinet. Of course, that would be stupid.

So you whack a thermometer in your mouth and notice you’ve got a slightly elevated temperature.

So the next thing you probably do is go to the doctor; the doctor asks some questions, does a few more diagnostics, and then tells you you’ve got an infection.

The doctor then prescribes a particular antibiotic for the infection. You take the tablets and slowly recover.

There is a clear business parallel.

At first sight of a problem, many businesses will grab every tool they have available. They’ll do some extra training, advertising, staff motivation, new reporting, and any other thing they can get their hands on. It’s the equivalent of reaching into the medicine cabinet and popping a bunch of pills you “think” will work.

Customer surveys, focus groups, and market research are the business’s thermometers from a customer service or sales perspective. They take a quick temperature check of the organisation.

However, the business temperature tools can’t tell you what the problem is, and, like a thermometer, these tools can’t fix the problem.

Tools such as operational audits, Mystery Shopping and external consultants act more like the diagnostic doctor. You don’t see the doctor every day, but when you visit the doctor, they delve deep, prod and diagnose the problem. You don’t need to do a mystery shop every day any more than you need to see a doctor every day. Find the problem, then do your maintenance.

Management then comes in as the medicine. Management fixes the specific problem identified by the diagnostic, detected by the thermometer. Sometimes the pill has nasty after effects, but there’s a net good.

To wrap up the analogy. Not all pills are nasty or have to fix a problem. The doctor could just as quickly prescribe a vitamin for good general (preventative) health.