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...

Marketing Moment: Keiretsu (pronounced kā-rĕt′soo͞ ) By Desiree Grace Healthy eating. Cleanliness. Politeness. Respect for elders. These are traits we often associate with Japanese culture, and they’re worth admiring. But Japan’s business culture offers equally powerful lessons. After World War II, Japan partnered with the United States to rebuild its economy. (If only that level of civility and collaboration were common practice today. Imagine the progress we could make if adversaries worked together for the greater good.) From that partnership came LEAN manufacturing, Zero Work in Process, and other best practices still shaping global industry eight decades later. One of the most compelling concepts from this era is Keiretsu . What is Keiretsu? Loosely translated, Keiretsu refers to a deeply connected, intentionally cultivated business partnership, one that transcends a standard vendor-customer relationship, and certainly not anything underhanded. Instead, it is an eleva...

White Swan Strategy: Increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)—It’s NOT Magic! Desiree Grace   Some people think loyal customers are like magical unicorns—rare, and subject to luck, alignment of the planets, and other uncontrollable nonsense—the stuff of fairy tales. I would argue that loyal customers are WHITE SWANS. White Swans are highly predictable events that can be easily anticipated, and their size and importance can be easily estimated. You DO have control, if you know what to do. The choice is yours. Customer Lifetime Value defined Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is key to customer retention and long-term profitability.  You can measure this easily by multiplying customer annual revenue by customer lifespan. Then, subtract any acquisition costs for year one and retention or servicing costs, like rebates, from the annual number, and presto! You have customer lifetime value. Let’s walk through an example: Cobalt Electric buys $10,000 per month per year from St...

For New Salespeople, it all starts with a phone call. Many new salespeople in distribution are tempted to skip introductory phone calls in their efforts to contact new accounts.  After many one-on-one sessions with these new sellers, I have concluded that sending emails and/or LinkedIn messages to potential new customers feels less daunting, less intrusive, and overall, less stressful than picking up the phone and making a real-live telephone call. Sadly, the plan rarely, if ever, works.   To better understand why this is the case, allow me to share a brief, but typical story. During the 30 minutes I devoted to outlining this article, I received over 39 emails, not counting those that were automatically diverted to the spam folder. Most of the messages were from people I do not know. Messages that had even the slightest sniff of sales were sent spiraling downward to the electronic version email hades. The email settings of busy plant managers, engineers, maintenance mana...

It’s National Memory Day It seems like I discover a new holiday every day.  Today’s special day is promoted as a day to celebrate our memories.  As you might imagine, I have many memories.  For example, I still remember June 6, 1977.  On that fateful day, I walked into the main lobby of the Allen-Bradley building at 1202 South Second Street in Milwaukee.    I had on a newly acquired three-piece gray suit and a conservative blue tie.  The weather was warmish, I was nervous, and I can still recall feeling a bit uncomfortable in business. I can remember a few other important days in my career.  I won’t bore you to tears with the details, but memories, being little snapshots of life, have a way of sticking with us.  But the mind is a strange thing, while bits of minutia linger, other important points slip through the cracks disappearing forever.   What slips through the cracks? Routine and often repeated activities can be the first to go....

I love a good challenge.  While talking about sales training with a sales manager from another industry, I made the statement, “Our kind of selling is different.”  The sales manager, who fancies himself as an expert and comes from a consumer-based background, took offense.  He asked me to differentiate our type of sales from the sales background he experienced.   Transactional sales Thinking back on the several hundred books on selling that I have read, I would characterize all but a handful as focusing on transactional selling.   Transactional selling is focused on making a one-time sale and then moving on to the next customer.   This type of selling is often used for commoditized products or services.   Think about the last computer you purchased.   Did the company create or provide anything that caused you to want to continue your relationship?   In my mind, the salesperson's goal was to make the sale – period.     O...

I recently attended the AHTD Spring Meeting.  I always enjoy these meetings.  They keep me up to date with the industry and always provide plenty of networking opportunities.  It's important to eat meals and have drinks with future friends (I've never met a stranger) to gain insight.  During an after-hours meeting one night, a brand-new sales manager asked me about keeping customers as prices continue to rise. I thought back to an article I wrote for IMARK Now Magazine.  Specifically, I addressed how distributors could find new customers and nurture their current customers.  I began the article with these half dozen thoughts I believe distributors everywhere should use to better focus their businesses:    Thought One:   Over the years, distributors have done a poor job of selecting their customers.  In many instances, it is the customer who selects the distributor for reasons often unknown to the distributor. Thought Two: The cost of br...