Customer

This week, elevate your customer service strategy with insights from Karl Schaphorst. Discover the pivotal role customer care plays in driving business success beyond reactive support.

Join Mike Montague and Louie Gravance as they dive into the secrets of making customer service a superpower.

From forging connections that defy the limits of the transaction to infuse every interaction with the magic of storytelling, Will Guidara unravels the threads of thought that have woven his path to success.

Emily Reggia, Sandler's enterprise marketing manager, joins us at Inbound to share her expertise and insights on keeping the customer at the heart of our business.

Prepare to revolutionize your understanding of customer education as we sit down with Courtney Sembler, Director of the HubSpot Academy.

In this episode, Jeff Stasiuk talks about the significance of writing effective field copy that can grab people's attention and lead them toward the sales funnel.

It’s usually pretty easy for us to think about the seller’s journey. That’s our sales process, and most of us are accustomed to thinking about that journey, simply because we already know what our own decision-making process looks like for deciding who we want to work with (and who we don’t). But what about the buyer’s decision-making process?

There are four predictable steps that impact all major purchase decisions. Do you know what they are?

In an article originally published at Forbes.com for the Forbes Business Development Council, Sandler CEO and President David Mattson details the modern buyer’s journey.

The goal of creating a better buying experience is to make it easier for people to buy. In this podcast, we will discuss the importance of follow-up after an initial discovery call or demo, and how sales reps can use tools like Qwilr to progress conversations.

Sales are all about relationships. To be successful, you need to be able to build trust and rapport with your potential customers. And one of the best ways to do that is by reading other people.

Mike Montague interviews Aaron Montgomery on How to Succeed at Suspending Your Disbelief. Aaron wrote Suspend Your Belief to help others learn the importance that every experience is an opportunity to grow, learn, and share and that by sharing your knowledge you can help others on the way too.

Mike Montague interviews Kristen Cox, a former government official and management expert, on How to Succeed at Making Real Progress. Kristen is a co-author of Stop Decorating the Fish.

Mike Montague interviews John Barron, voice coach and vocal expert of the Alexander Technique, on How to Succeed Vocally. 

Mike Montague interviews John Glennon on How to Succeed at Customer Success. 

Mike Montague interviews Mike Crandall, Sandler trainer from Oklahoma, on How to Succeed at Understanding Motivation. Mike is the author of Motivational Management the Sandler Way.

Within the professional buyer/seller environment, preferences and practices have altered dramatically since the spring of 2020.

Within the professional buyer/seller environment, preferences and practices have altered dramatically since the spring of 2020.

Keeping a client is typically ten times cheaper and easier than finding a new one. Here are five powerful behaviors you can build into your account plan to support better, more profitable, and more loyal business relationships.

Mike Montague interviews Janice Lintz on How to Succeed at Changing the World.

There’s been a lively debate among sales leaders in recent years and it centers on a big question: Has the digital selling environment we are all now operating in brought about a fundamental change in what it means to be a professional salesperson?

Remember the childhood game of whispering a phrase to someone and asking them to pass it on? By the time it reached the fourth or fifth person, the meaning of the original phrase was lost! Then, it amused us; in customer care, it can be costly.

Are “Relationships” really relevant to the sales profession?

Everyone wants to know what business closed today. Or this week. Or this quarter. But is that really all we should be asking?

Mike Montague interviews Ray Setter on How to Succeed at Customer Service.

The value of client retention is significant, especially when compared to the cost of customer acquisition.

Brian Sullivan Interviews Jonathon Farrington on The Critical Elements of Proactive Client Retention.

In order to combat this frustration and fear of product obsolescence, producers offer you over-the-air updates that upgrade your product’s software to perform new tasks and make your user experience, in general, more satisfying.

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road can take you there.” ― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

Some businesses and leaders act like trail leaders. They research their maps and information about an area they plan to explore. They plan their travels well when hiking a path through the wilderness.

As 2019 draws to a close, it makes sense to survey the landscape and take note of the ideas and innovations that are most likely to affect markets, and sales teams, in the year to come. With that in mind, here are five emerging trends we at Sandler believe sales professionals should be on the watch for in the year 2020.

It’s that time of year. The holidays loom, there is a chill in the air, and countless articles appear providing guidance to sales representatives about how to close the year strong. The five, ten or twenty best strategies are outlined in checklists to insure end-of-year success. “Contact every client” is an action often recommended, as is “Revisit prospects who have chosen another vendor.”

We’ve all heard the sobering statistics that winning a new major account costs far more than keeping one – depending on the study you read, perhaps twenty times as much. And we’ve all heard how even a small increase in a firm’s overall major client retention rate has an exponentially positive effect on revenues and profits. We also know, of course, that, on the flip side, decreases in retention rates produce similarly negative impacts, often devastating and long-lasting.

Mike Montague interviews Carlos Garrido on How to Succeed at Asking for Referrals In this episode:

• Why do we struggle to ask for referrals?
• Attitudes to help you get business from referrals
• Give referrals to get referrals

Here are five simple ways we can improve the quality of our communication with the people who are currently buying from us and expand and deepen those relationships over time.

Read Time: 8 Minutes

Retail champions, the subject of my book RETAIL SUCCESS IN AN ONLINE WORLD, outlines not only how to connect with customers face-to-face but also a long-term engagement strategy for after the customer leaves the store. 

Read Time: 6 Minutes

Brian Sullivan, VP of Sandler Enterprise Selling and author, interviews guest, Emma Barrett-Hoey about how to succeed at enterprise-level selling. Brian is a co-author of the new Sandler book, Sandler Enterprise Selling: Winning, Growing and Retaining Major Accounts.

Sean Coyle, Sandler trainer, prospecting expert, and David H Sandler Award winner talks about how to lower defensive walls and build rapport quickly in a sales call. Learn the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of master salespeople and prospectors who can quickly and easily build trust with their prospects.

Learn how to engage and partner with gatekeepers to get to more decision-makers. Sean Coyle is Sandler's prospecting expert and host of the online course. In this episode, Sean talks about the attitudes, behaviors, and techniques of top sellers and how they interact with gatekeepers and admins. 

Learn how to do a simple five-part client satisfaction call using the RECON framework. Caroline Robinson, Sandler trainer from the UK, talks about checking in with your clients and getting on the same page.

Customer relationships are the lifeblood of any sellers’ career. The ability to attract clients, build rapport, and start sales conversations ultimately determines the level of success that a salesperson will enjoy. You can be an extreme specialist who knows all the tricks of the trade, but without supplementing your knowledge with interpersonal communication skills, you’ll fail to connect with your clients or prospects on a deeper level. Building rapport is essential to turn yourself from a transactional seller into a trusted partner. Below I’ve outlined four ways to strengthen your bond with clients.

One of the most obvious reasons you should be building brick walls around your existing clients is to reduce the impact of aggressive competitor activity. While you are off flirting with seemingly more attractive and exciting new opportunities, your competitors will be targeting your “home base.”

The more opportunities you have to interact with your prospects, the better, and the end of the year is an opportune time to reach out and reconnect with your clients and prospects to get in front of them prior to the new year.

But, that’s exactly what many salespeople attempt to do when they engage with a new prospect. Typically, it plays out in one of two ways. Either the salesperson attempts to force his solution on the prospect (after nothing more than a cursory analysis of the situation), or he allows the prospect to dictate the solution (again, without a proper analysis of the situation).

Early in every sellers’ career, they learn to segment clients. They have As, Bs, Cs, and “everybody else.” What separates great sellers from others, is their ability to balance these segments and manage their relationship with each. 

The How to Succeed Podcast is a public and free podcast from Sandler Training, the worldwide leader in sales, management, and customer service training for individuals all the way up to Fortune 500 companies with over 250 locations around the globe.

Welcome to Selling the Sandler Way, with your host Dave Mattson, the president and CEO of Sandler Training. He is a five-time bestselling author, speaker, trainer, and consultant to hundreds of international organizations. In this show, he talks to other Sandler trainers about the Sandler Selling System.

The sales industry is fast-paced now and isn’t showing signs of slowing down. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the clutter of new selling techniques, emerging technologies, and more specialized analytics. Although those components – and some others – can play a major role in your level of success. It would be a mistake to spend too much time on them and ignore the basics. Before you get carried away learning this or that, remember to take it back to your roots and ensure that you are providing optimum customer service. If you have strayed a bit or are just looking for a reminder, below are five imperative tactics to employ in your practice.

There are three tools that are particularly effective and easy to use in making people feel good about themselves: stroke, struggle, and validate. You can use one, two, or all three of these tools in interactions with patients—it depends on the situation.

You’ve closed the deal – but your job isn’t done quite yet. Managing client expectations can help you make the most of your new relationship and ensure you are striking the right balance. By working together to outline goals, define success, and clearly communicating your progress and milestones, you can increase transparency to build the long lasting relationship with your new client.

Fear may be the most powerful motivator affecting your buyers’ decisions. However, in their effort to maintain an image of power and control, buyers will be reluctant to share their true anxieties and concerns with you. You’ll increase your sales production when you help buyers discover and overcome their fears, show that you are sensitive to those issues, and then lead those buyers to the conclusion that your product will replace their fear with peace of mind.

2016 has been a year of many successes. Whether you are a sales representative, a sales manager, or simply interested in learning more about trending topics in the sales industry, we hope you have gathered some key insights from our blog this year. Before moving into 2017, we would like to take a look back and highlight some important topics from 2016.

The very best people skills that candidates will ever employ are on display in the interview situation as they try to win a position with your company. If they don’t capture you there, do you really want them in front of your valuable customers?

By focusing on tracking activities in a Customer Relationship Management software, you can evaluate which things influence prospects to move forward in your sales process. Understanding exactly what’s moving a deal forward will help you decide the best next steps you should take to close any similar deal in the future. Tracking activities also highlights the telltale signs that a deal might be slipping away, and helps you pay it the proper attention to keep it moving forward. 

Customer service is an interesting aspect of any business. Whether you call it inside sales or customer care, your frontline employee may have the most difficult job in the company. Have you ever cringed when listening to one of your frontline people on the phone? Do you find your staff to be too strict with the policies or too loose?

Just like all the other areas of a company—the warehouse, the accounting department, shipping—customer care is a process. In fact, it typically involves a number of processes, such as incoming order processing, returns and re-stocking, setting up new accounts and solving customer problems. If a customer-care candidate does not already have a process orientation, it will be an uphill battle to instill one. Consider the following true story.

Instead of repeating the same customer service behaviors over and over with customers who have their unique characteristics and preferences, every employee must learn how to adjust their customer service style from one customer to the next. If we do not do this, some customers are left disappointed, even when the customer service standards have been met.

Have you ever been in front of a prospect and found yourself in a situation where you felt something, but were afraid to say it out loud?

Have you ever blurred the line between "friend" and "customer?"

Have you ever stayed with a stalled prospect too long?

If you want to measure productivity in your customer-care providers, measure their bias toward action before you hire. Taking action is a quality that says, “I must do something, so I’ll quickly assess the situation, decide on a path, and do something myself.” Rather than wait for the customer to call back, a bias toward action says to reach out to the customer first. A bias toward action is the proactive ingredient in customer care.

I spend about 80% of my time working with sales professionals to perfect their ability to structure the questions that need to be asked. They all understand the importance of asking questions but need some assistance in creating their own tailored versions. Salesmen often enjoy the exercise of deciphering which questions uncover the compelling reasons the prospect should do business with them. 

You know good customer service when you experience it. It's hard to explain at times when it's not so great, but it's easy to recognize when a customer service agent has gone above and beyond to make sure you're satisfied. At some point, every day, everyone is a customer. A good customer service experience is something that everyone can relate to - so what is it that makes for an exquisite customer service touchpoint

If you've heard the any of the following statements from prospects, then keep reading to learn more about how to determine when to walk away and when to continue investing time and energy. "I need to confer with other managers here." "I need more time to decide." "Call me in about a month."

Nothing lasts forever, right? While it may seem pessimistic, having a plan for dealing with a client's departure is sound advice when it comes to maintaining business and clients. We spend so much time building solid, trusting relationships with clients that it can come as quite a blow when news hits that your client contact announces they're leaving their current position.

Aberdeen's research shows that the best sales training companies, like Sandler Training, integrate sales training and customer relationship management.

I have been doing a lot of traveling during the last two months. In spite of Chicago's brutal weather and some minor inconveniences, my flights and hotel reservations have gone remarkably smoothly and I have experienced a high level of customer service.

The other day, people in the training center were discussing how they go about building trust. The group shared lots of ideas, and every idea they shared would probably do the trick. When all was said and done, we had a list of about twenty things people could do to build trust.

As a salesperson, I seem to take quite a few lessons from movies and some of the best lessons are in some of the worst movies. Most people think Burt Reynolds played only tough guy roles and the occasional slapstick comedy role. But one of the best sales lessons I have ever learned was from the movie "The End." If you have not seen "The End," do not rush out to rent it. I am about to spoil the plot for you. This is kind of a cute movie starring Dom DeLuise and Burt Reynolds.

Whoever said talk is cheap didn't know much about sales. Talk-too much talk, that is-can cost a lot. This is a difficult lesson for many sales professionals to learn, and that's understandable. People in sales tend to have outgoing personalities. They enjoy good conversation, and the longer they are in sales, the better they get at making small talk, establishing an emotional connection with the prospect, and driving a conversation toward the specific end of closing a sale

It's March Madness time, which I enjoy, but not always for the same reasons my friends do. Because I'm in sales, it's fun just to watch the teams execute their strategies and then try to figure out how these strategies apply to my own profession. And what stands out, season after season, is how predictable the plays have become and how easily they can be countered