You might be one who walks around saying how good of a sales leader you are, but it’s totally worthless if your customers don’t think the same about you. When somebody tells me they don’t have great customers and they would like to get rid of most of them, I have to wonder if maybe the salesperson has it all backwards.
Maybe it’s not the customer who needs to be fired. Maybe it’s the salesperson.
Harsh thinking? Yes, but I’ve seen far too many salespeople running around saying how good they are in one sentence and then in the next sentence ripping on their customers.
Check out this 35-second video on lousy customers:
Our actions, our behavior and our words all become part of the image the customer paints of us. Maybe the painting the customer has is anything but a Monet or Rembrandt. Maybe it’s a piece of junk ready to be discarded in Tuesday’s trash.
Our behavior will quickly be mirrored by our customers. It happens in B2C and yes even B2B. Recently I got an Uber. The driver had his radio on talk radio. Interestingly, some of the rants on the radio were about how Uber couldn’t be trusted, but the driver went on and on about how that’s not true and how Uber provides excellent service.
All of this came after the driver didn’t bother to get out of his car to help put my luggage into the trunk. He lived up to it on the other end too by not getting out of the car to help me retrieve my luggage from the trunk. Put bluntly, all his talk of how great Uber is didn’t come close to his actions. I followed through on my end by not rating him and certainly not giving him a tip. My actions toward him were a reflection not of his “perfect talk” but of his imperfect actions.
Think about this in context of your customer conversations and how you deal with customers. Are your words and actions matching? Do they represent the definition of “sales leadership?”
Look at the customers you think are lousy and ask yourself truthfully if you made them lousy? Were their actions, words and behavior simply a reflection of your poor leadership and service?
Sales leadership is what we all need to be doing, but we have to continually challenge and question how others see it. Success is not what others do to us. Success is what we do to ourselves and it starts with our own sales leadership.
And don’t forget that a coach can help you excel in your sales career! Invest in yourself by checking out my coaching program today!
Copyright 2018, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results
