I love stand-up comedy. When I travel, one of the entertainment venues I always seek out is a comedy club. Some are good, some are mediocre, and every now and then, one is truly awful – but I almost always seem to have a good time. One of my favorite comedians (well, me and millions of others) is Jerry Seinfeld. He has a routine that tells us a lot about selling services.
In the routine, he talks about dry cleaners. He doesn’t trust them, he says, “Because I don’t think they’re really doing it. What is dry cleaning? They take my clothes back into a room that I can’t see, and then charge them to give them back to me.” He then brushes some lint off his jacket and says, “Here. That’s dry cleaning.” It’s hilarious (much more in the viewing than in my retelling), but there’s a lesson here if you sell services. In fact, if you sell a pure service – perhaps one that is invisible most of the time – you can probably relate to what Jerry’s saying. Worse, your customers can relate.
When you sell products, it’s easy to remind your customers of the relationship, your value, and your quality. They see the tangible result all the time. Service sales are much tougher. To keep a service relationship alive, salespeople (and customer service people) must be much more proactive. Here are five keys to preserving the service relationship:
- Always be diligent. One downfall of the ‘invisible service relationship’ is that sometimes, the people delivering that service can get a little lax. If your service is that way – for instance, your service is some sort of a recurring activity that doesn’t require the service people to check in with the customer on a regular basis – you MUST constantly check and verify that the service is being done. The worst thing is to get “caught” by the customer. Many times, if this happens, you simply won’t be able to recover.
- Remind them. When your service isn’t the reminder of the great value to bring to them, YOU must be the reminder. Schedule ongoing business reviews. If you know the results of your work (ROI, cost savings, time savings, etc.), bring those numbers and show them. If you don’t know (and sometimes you might not), bring the data on the service activities you’ve performed, and don’t be afraid to ASK for the results.
- Don’t be the Invisible Salesman. Just as with service personnel, it’s very tempting in these situations to sit back and wait for the call from the customer on the ‘no news is good news’ paradigm. Don’t. One of the great weaknesses of the insurance industry is the salesperson who only calls the customer at renewal time. Many times, that salesperson calls at renewal time only to discover that another salesperson has come in and picked his/her pocket by forming a relationship while salesperson #1 was sitting back and doing nothing.
- Ask the tough questions. The toughest question for any salesperson to ask is, “Have I/we delivered on the promises we made?” The most fearless salesperson will choke a bit trying to get this question out – but get it out you must. Believe it or not, every sales question you ask will boil down to this one. And if you don’t ask it yourself, your customer will ask it of themselves – and answer it themselves, without your involvement. Do you want to be part of that discussion?
- Keep renewing contacts. One potential pitfall in service relationships – particularly those that are contract-based – is that the salesperson can be lulled into falling out of touch between contract periods. Don’t do this. The problem is that, no matter how good your relationship is with the contact that signed your agreement, people move, they change jobs, they get promoted, they get fired. Then when it comes time to renew, you walk in fat, dumb, and happy, only to find out that nobody knows you and you’re basically on a cold call, having lost the advantage of incumbency. Don’t do that. Constantly work to get multiple contacts (remember High, Wide, and Deep), and keep relationships alive.
The reason that many customers are suspicious of service delivery are that, often times, services aren’t delivered as promised. If that’s your company, there’s very little you can do from a sales perspective to regain lost trust. The best thing you can do is actively monitor and check to make sure services are delivered, and to stay in contact with your customer. Do these things, and your customers won’t compare you to Seinfeld’s dry cleaner!
