A Perfect Failure Part 3: Expecting Your Company to Be Perfect 🕒 2 min read By Frank Hurtte People inside your company are prone to making mistakes. The warehouse ships the wrong part. Customer service transposes two numbers. Accounting sends an invoice that leaves everyone scratching their heads. Inside sales misunderstands a purchase order. It happens. Such are the travails of working with humans. One of the biggest surprises of my career was discovering that customers are generally more forgiving than salespeople expect. They understand mistakes happen because they run businesses too. What they don't tolerate is finger-pointing, excuses, or silence. I once watched a salesperson spend fifteen minutes proving a mistake wasn't his fault. By the time he finished, he'd convinced the customer nobody else inside his company could be trusted either. Accountability has rescued more customer relationships than perfection ever has. Companies don't earn loyalty by avoiding ever...

When Things Go Wrong, Here’s Your Moment to Shine By Desiree Grace and Frank Hurtte Scientific research backs up something every seasoned distributor already knows: a perfectly smooth transaction doesn’t build loyalty, but a problem handled exceptionally well does. In Human Sigma: Managing the Employee-Customer Encounter , Gallup’s John H. Fleming and Jim Asplund found that customers who experience a problem that is fixed quickly and effectively become more loyal than customers who never had an issue at all. Think about this: the customer with a headache becomes your strongest advocate if you handle the recovery right. And let’s be honest, problems will happen. Back-orders appear. Pricing loads incorrectly. Freight gets damaged. Manufacturers sometimes send the wrong firmware. Instead of hiding these ugly moments, smart distributors embrace them as opportunities to display competence, character, and commitment. Because the truth is this: A flawless transaction doesn’t reveal who you ...

Gardening Your Way to Sales Growth By Desiree Grace I love raspberries. I love them so much that I’ve planted, nurtured, and harvested them at three different homes. But raspberries aren’t easy. They demand time, patience, commitment, and an understanding of what they need to thrive. Growing raspberries reminds me a lot of business development. That connection came to me recently as I picked my second massive basket of berries in just two weeks. Lesson One: Understand the Needs We won’t dive into targeting today. That’s a topic for another post, but once your target is clear, the real work begins. My target was raspberries. Yours might be local contractors, the transportation sector, or power utilities. Business development, like gardening, takes research, homework, and a lot of questions. Know your target. What do they like? What helps them grow? Raspberries need sunlight and room to spread. Your contractor might thrive on good pricing, fast delivery, and reliable em...