‘Success’
A Tale of Two Storms
Why is it that when two companies are faced with the same dilemma, one of them comes through with flying colors while the other just drops the ball completely? To me, it has everything to do with the culture and attitude that permeates the entire organization, from the top on down.
A few weeks ago while delivering a keynote speech at a corporate sales meeting in Tampa; I spoke about the merits of Southwest Airlines. Afterwards, one of the audience members relayed to me an experience he had with Southwest that proved my point completely.
This guy lives in Chicago. At the time of the story he had a girlfriend in Baltimore, who he would visit every weekend. The story takes place during the summer, when thunderstorms always make flying out of Chicago an adventure.
One weekend he was headed to Baltimore on U.S. Air. While seated in the gate area waiting to board, an announcement came over the PA system which said, “We are expecting thunderstorms in the area. So instead of boarding now and taking the chance you’ll be stuck sitting on the plane waiting for the weather to clear, we’ll just keep you in the gate area.” The upshot: the flight arrived in Baltimore three hours late.
The very next weekend he was again heading to Baltimore, this time on Southwest Airlines. While sitting in the gate area, the same announcement came over the loudspeaker, which told the passenger about thunderstorms in the area. But this time they followed by saying, “So we’re going to speed up the process; start boarding immediately and try to beat the thunderstorms out of here. In fact, we’re going to be extremely annoying in order to get you to move quickly. Let’s see if we can get those thunderstorms chasing US all the way to Baltimore.”
Needless to say they left on time and landed on time; why is that? Culture, that’s why.
The US Air people were most concerned about “Not screwing up and making people angry.” In the back of their minds they were probably saying, “What happens if we board them and the thunderstorms hit before they take off? All those people will get stuck sitting on the plane and we’ll look like idiots.” As if sitting in the gate area for three hours was a FAR better alternative.
The people from Southwest were only concerned with succeeding, and as you know, if you’re long time reader of this blog; listen to my Monday Motivational Minute; or read my book, The Best Damn Sales Book Ever, “Not failing,” is a lot different than succeeding.
The troubling part of this story is the lack of effort put forth by the people from US Air. There was nothing stopping them from doing the same thing Southwest did; except the different attitudes and cultures of the two airlines.
At Southwest, the attitude is, “Let’s do whatever it takes to get this plane out of here on time.” At US Air (and many other companies), the attitude is, “We did what we were supposed to do. Everything would have been OK if it weren’t for the thunderstorms, which is something totally beyond our control.”
First off, you will never be successful doing just what you are supposed to do. Like the people at Southwest Airlines, success only comes to those who do MORE than they’re supposed to do.
Second, while thunderstorms are not something you can control and could be unexpected, the most successful people and companies constantly prepare for the unexpected. While we never know what’s going to happen, you can rest assured that something always will happen!
The kind of culture and attitude found at Southwest Airlines (and any other successful company), always starts at the top. While innovation is a bottom up process that starts with the people closest to the action, an outstanding culture, attitude and commitment are top down qualities that start with upper management and permeate every corner of an organization.
By the way, BAD culture, attitude and commitment do the same thing no matter how large or small your company. If you want to learn more about forming solid client relationships and delivering amazing customer service, I’m offering Make My Life Easier: What the 21st Century Customer Really Wants, plus my other video and CD packages, at a 40% discount until February 11th, 2009. Click here!
Look In The Mirror
Amid the growing world financial and credit crisis, the one thing we don’t seem to have a shortage of is finger-pointing. However, with so much blame to go around, nobody (especially politicians) ever seems to point the finger at themselves.
This point was emphasized quite clearly in a September 19th, 2008 Wall Street Journal article.
The article was about the surge in the number of foreclosures of million dollar plus homes. The beginning of the article talked about a man named Robert Provost, who in 2003 purchased a $2.5 million villa with its own boat dock in Sarasota, Fla.
Mr. Provost earned more than $250,000 a year working for an auto-sales chain and had an impeccable credit history.
Then he lost his job and missed one $10,500 mortgage payment, then another. This month, he put his house on the market for $3.4 million, but the listing has attracted very little interest. Mr. Provost expects to receive a notice of default- the first step to foreclosure in the next month or two.
I kept reading the article, looking for some reaction to this, and waiting to see if someone, anyone, was thinking the same thing I was. However, the only two quotes I saw from people trying to explain this phenomenon of million dollar plus foreclosures were an economist from Wellesley College, Karl Case, who said, “If you’ve got a lender who pushed them to the limit and you have some change in supply or demand, you’ll have foreclosures.”
Hmmm, “the lender pushed them to the limit.” Sounds a little like Flip Wilson’s old routine, “The devil made me do it.”
Next we had Tom Lawler, a housing economist in Leesburg, Va. who said, “Loans were unbelievably risky in every category. We’re seeing the results of that lending in the high end.”
Are you seeing where I’m heading with this? No one asked the simple question: What the hell is an employee (not a business owner) who is making $250,000 a year doing buying a $2.5 million house? Plus, the fact that Mr. Provost stopped making mortgage payments right after he lost his job tells me he went into this with no cushion. Whose fault is that?
Oh, and if you’re thinking that some unscrupulous lender talked him into this let me give you one more piece of info that I withheld till now: Mr. Provost’s job with the auto-sales chain was that of finance chief! No wonder he’s out of work.
Let me tell you what happened to too many people. They saw friends, neighbors and people on TV making what looked like “easy money,” just buying, selling and flipping houses. You didn’t need any money or income, because the prices would just keep going up (where, in fantasy land) and all you need to do is sell and use that money for the next purchase, or maybe even buy two. Why work for a living, when there’s such a sure thing staring you in the face?
As you know the bubble burst and many of these people want to be bailed out. What about the vast majority of people who paid and continue to pay their mortgages on time? Nobody was asking for a bailout when they were making money and they certainly weren’t going to share it with the homeowners who weren’t speculating.
Investing is a risk, whether it’s real estate or the stock market (I own 1,000 shares of AIG and you know what? This won’t be the first time I take a beating, nor will it be the last. I bought it. I knew the risk. Hell, life is a risk. If you want to be successful you have to take chances. Success is as much about failing as it is about succeeding. But when those chances blow up in your face (and sometimes they will), stop looking for scapegoats (that’s the job of gutless politicians), just look in the mirror and move on.
Doing Business By Accident Is Over
The age of doing business by accident is over. Clients and customers have so many choices today that you can’t expect to just show up, throw your briefcase on the table, and grab an order.
Now, is this a doom-and-gloom scenario, stating that there’s no more opportunity out there? Of course not. In fact, there’s more opportunity out there today than ever before. I really believe that no matter how successful you are right now, you have an opportunity to be more successful than you’ve ever been before.
There’s just one catch: In today’s competitive world there is no more margin for error.The companies and the people that will succeed today, tomorrow, and on into the future are the ones who will be willing to do everything RIGHT.
I know that as a client, customer, or consumer I can buy almost anything I want from the Internet and I never have to talk to you! So the question now becomes, what is it that you are willing to do for all your clients, customers, and prospects that creates so much extra value that it is more beneficial for them to buy directly from you than to just click on their computers?
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In other words, how are you differentiating yourself from the competition?
I think the single biggest question I have for you is this: What are you really selling?
Are you just selling whatever will get you the fastest commission, or are you selling extraordinary quality, service, convenience, and value? Are you just selling the first thing out of your bag, just to get your boss off your back, or are you selling “Save me time and make my life easier”? Are you just selling whatever the customer thinks they want and need, or are you selling knowledge, expertise, information, and education?
Are you just selling stuff? Are you just selling what everyone else is selling? Because if you are, I can click on my computer and I can buy stuff from the cheapest guy in town.
Get out there and sell some value.
Your Clients Are Not Experts On What You Do
I guarantee there is not a single client, customer, or prospect who wants to be an expert on what it is that you do. That’s what we have you for: to be our expert, adviser, and resource.
Your clients do not have the time nor the inclination to be an expert on what it is that you do. Heck, most clients don’t have the time to keep up with all the information they need to be experts in their own field, let alone yours. That’s why your ability to supply your clients with knowledge, expertise, information, and education is critical to not only your success, but theirs, too.
THE FOURTEENTH ROCK-SOLID RULE FOR ACHIEVING SALES SUCCESS
Successful salespeople act as experts, advisers, and resources to their clients, always ready to provide them with knowledge, expertise, information, and education.
As an expert, adviser, and resource, your job goes way beyond supplying your clients with great products and great service.Your job is also to provide the client with the knowledge, expertise, information, and education they need to be more successful in their career or business.
If you can do that on a consistent basis, you will have differentiated yourself from the competition, created so much extra value that your price almost becomes immaterial, and reached the zenith of success in sales:You will have made yourself indispensable to the client.
THE FIFTEENTH ROCK-SOLID RULE FOR ACHIEVING SALES SUCCESS
Successful salespeople are indispensable to their clients.
For example, I’ve done a lot of work with salespeople in the cable TV advertising business. Many of their clients are local small businesses.
These are the kind of businesses that don’t have an ad agency representing them and are not big enough to have their own advertising or marketing department. The most successful cable TV advertising salespeople I’ve met don’t just sell ads to these businesses; they lend their knowledge and expertise to these clients while acting as the client’s advertising and marketing consultant.
These successful salespeople first find out everything they can about their client’s business. Then, rather than just selling them an ad or series of ads, they help the client formulate an advertising and marketing plan designed to help them get the biggest bang for their ad dollar and, consequently, increase the client’s business.
By the way, if you haven’t figured it out yet, when you increase a client’s business it not only makes you indispensable, but it gives the client the wherewithal to buy even more from you. Talk about a win-win.
Successful Salespeople Create And Deliver Value
This is a free excerpt from Chapter 12 of The Best Damn Sales Book Ever.
As a professional speaker, I have a huge edge on many of my clients: I don’t speak in only one industry. I speak in a wide variety of industries to a wide variety of companies. One of the many things I enjoy about what I do is that I get to learn about all these different industries and companies. I also get to see what goes on in these industries and their marketplaces. Let me tell you what I see going on in almost every single industry and marketplace that I have walked into in the last 5 to 10 years.
The middle is dead! The middle is gone!
If you want to be successful in today’s business world and economy, you have to be one of two things: the cheapest or the best.
The days are long gone when you could sell a pretty good product or pretty good service at a pretty good price, because I can get “pretty good” at a dirt cheap price. Or I can get “fantastic” at just a little more expensive price, because pretty good just isn’t good enough anymore.
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Look around you, go to any shopping mall. Look at the stores that do business and look at the stores that do not. On the one hand, you have your deep discounters, such as Wal-Mart,Target, and Kohl’s. But even down at this end, where price is supposedly the deciding factor, how do you explain what happened to Kmart? Similar merchandise, similar prices, but not nearly the same results as Wal-Mart, Target, or Kohl’s.
Walk into a Wal-Mart,Target, or Kohl’s and you’ll find them well lit (you could use a pair of sunglasses in Wal-Mart) and well stocked. I don’t know about you, but I’ve walked into quite a few Kmarts that were poorly lit, and let me tell you something about poor lighting. When a store is poorly lit it looks dingy.When it looks dingy, it can look dirty, even if it’s clean.
Another thing I noticed in Kmart are what’s known as “holes in the shelves.” This is a retailing term signifying they’re out of that item, causing a big empty space on the shelf (hence the term).Now I don’t know about you, but for me the biggest reason to go to a large discounter like Wal-Mart is that I don’t have to worry they won’t have what I’m looking for, since they seem to have everything. With time becoming such a precious commodity in people’s lives, do you really think people want to shop somewhere that won’t have what they’re looking for and they’ll have to go somewhere else? So even down at the price end there’s a value component.
Let’s look at the other side of the coin from the cheapest—let’s go to the best.These are retail stores like Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, Lord & Taylor, along with specialty operations like Banana Republic and Abercrombie and Fitch.
Then right in the middle you have those mid-range, midprice department stores. You remember those places.Your mother used to drag you there as a kid. Thirty years ago every major city in America had at least three or four of them, and now maybe one or two are left. They either went out of business, merged, or were taken over.
What made the department stores great in their heyday was personal service. Once the discounters started to flex their muscles by cutting price, the department stores started to do the same.The problem was, in order to cut their price, they had to cut somewhere else, and where do you think that was? That’s right, they got rid of the people who provided personal service.
The customers responded predictably. They figured as long as they were going to get abused, they might as well go to a discounter and pay less for the privilege.
You don’t compete on what your competition does best and you don’t. You compete on what you do best and they don’t.
So here it is: You have to be the cheapest or the best. The question is, where do you want to be? Well, if you want my advice, I’ll tell you where you never want to be. You never want to be the cheapest. You never want to be known as the “price company” or the “price salesperson.”
THE TWELFTH ROCK-SOLID RULE FOR ACHIEVING SALES SUCCESS
Successful salespeople consistently create and sell value, rather than get stuck selling price.
How To Lose 1 Million Customers In 3 Months
Everything happens for a reason, especially in business. Companies don’t go out of business or lose customers for reasons totally beyond their control: there’s always a reason.
Most likely their service stunk; or they had really bad management. Perhaps their prices were out of whack with the value, or lack of same, they provided. But believe me; it has nothing to do with bad luck, bad economy or competition. As with anything else in life, when things aren’t going the way you hoped they would, your best bet is to look in the mirror. That brings me to Sprint.
On MarketWatch, there was an article last week titled, Sprint loses more money, customers.
The article began:
“Sprint Nextel Corp. on Monday said it lost more than 1 million of its most profitable customers (about to be 1 million and 1, I might add) in the first three months of 2008 as the company’s net loss widened in the most recent quarter.
Sprint has lost millions of customers to rivals in the past few years owing to poor customer service, a less appealing selection of phones and snafus related to it’s $35 billion purchase of Nextel in 2005.
Chief Executive Daniel Hesse, hired in December, has already taken a number of steps to improve the company’s financial performance and its relationship with customers.”
Well, you could have fooled me.
I have been a Sprint Wireless customer for over 5 years, which definitely puts me WAYYYYY above average. However, as it stands right now, I will be an ex-customer when my contract runs out in February of ’09.
I have four cell numbers under contract; one for each member of the family. This last contract started back in May of 2006. It had 2100 anytime minutes per month, unlimited nights and weekends, no roaming charges and was a “Fair and Flexible Plan,” meaning if we went over our minutes we would only be charged $5 for each 100 minute overage.
A few months later I realized we didn’t need 2100 anytime minutes (I use Skype far more than my cell; better value), so I downgraded the plan to 1400 anytime minutes per month. Little did I know (because nobody ever bothered to tell me) that when I changed my plan Sprint extended it another 2 years, meaning instead of my plan expiring in May of ’08, it won’t expire until February of ’09.
On top of that, when I received my latest bill I noticed that I was charged twenty cents per minute extra for going over my minutes: What happened to Fair and Flexible?
So I called Sprint Customer Service, something I really hate doing, because there’s never any way to do it quickly. I was told that when I changed my plan I lost the Fair and Flexible component because that service was no longer being offered at that time (Probably because it was a good thing for the customer). I asked how come I was never notified of this at the time and naturally I received a stupid answer. I was also told that Sprint no longer offered the Fair and Flexible plan (remember this part; it comes up later).
Now, to add insult to injury, Sprint announced a couple of months ago that as a service to their customers, in their latest effort to stop the bleeding, they will no longer penalize customers and extend their contracts just for changing their plans.
Now here’s a real pet peeve of mine!
Don’t you just hate it when companies treat new customers better than they treat their long term loyal customers? Cellphone companies are notorious for this.
So now I’m really ticked and I’m going to complain. I decide I want to write a letter to Daniel Hesse, the new CEO, since he claims he wants to improve the company’s relationship with its customers.
But now there’s a problem: I go to the Sprint website and nowhere on that website is there an address for their corporate headquarters or even an email address for the CEO. I guess Mr. Hesse, like so many other executives of bad companies only wants to improve customer relations if he doesn’t actually have to be in contact with any of us.
So once again I called customer service, only this time I started my stop watch. I told my story to the Customer Service Rep and the first thing he said was, “Let me see if I can get you back on the Fair and Flexible Plan.” I know what you’re saying, “I thought the Fair and Flexible Plan wasn’t being offered anymore,” and you’d be right to think that because that’s what I was told.
Don’t you just love it when two people from the same company tell you completely different stories? Remember what I said at the beginning; there are always good reasons why companies fail.
Naturally, I couldn’t get the Fair and Flexible plan but that didn’t matter; I wanted Sprint to do something for me or I would cancel my service when my contract was up. This young man said he couldn’t do anything for me but would transfer me to someone who could and he put me on hold while he went to contact that department.
After about a 5 minute wait I was put in touch with a woman who had no idea what I was calling about. Wouldn’t you assume, as I did, that when the first person said he would transfer me to someone who could help me, then put me on hold while he contacted them that he would have relayed the problem to them? Well, you, like me, would have been wrong. I had to tell my story all over again (another pet peeve).
Now I had been on the phone with Sprint for 24 minutes and had accomplished nothing, so I said to this woman, “Look here’s my story, the other person I spoke to said you would help me. I don’t have time to stay on the phone with you anymore, I’ve wasted enough time already. You have all my information. If you want to do something for me, call me and let me know.”
And I hung up…
It has now been over 24 hours and I haven’t heard from Sprint. What’s the odds that I never will? Probably, 1 to 1? Like I said before and I’ll say it again: there are always very valid reasons why companies fail.
