Living in the Past: The Old School of Sales and Service

Quick – what do you think of when I say “sales”?

Unless you are a salesperson yourself, you probably think of a slick car salesman in an ill-fitting suit, spouting a line like: “What would it take to put you into this car today?”

When people think sales, they associate it with being hustled and taken advantage of. They look at their dealings with salespeople as adversarial. The very word “sales” can prompt sleazy connotations, and people become automatically defensive in order not to be taken advantage of.

If they are of a certain age, some people think of the hustling character played by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross and lines like: “Coffee is for closers.” That’s the movie adapted from David Mamet’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize- and Tony award-winning play in which sales guys fight for a Cadillac El Dorado (first prize) or a set of steak knives (second prize). Third prize is getting fired. In such a competitive environment, the hapless customer is just a mark. Glengarry Glen Ross is so iconic in American sales circles that many salespeople quote from it liberally. I’ve seen clips from the movie at several companies’ sales conferences. And it’s no surprise that it powerfully reinforces the average customer’s unease with salespeople.

How about when I say, “customer service”? What comes to mind?

Many people describe the experience of calling a toll-free telephone line, only to be told, “Your call is important to us,” and then being forced to endure a frustratingly long wait “due to higher-than-average call volume.” When an actual person picks up on the other end of the line, it may be difficult to understand the accent of the outsourced representative in a far-off foreign land.

Or, if it is a face-to-face encounter with someone in customer support – an airline ticket counter, say – the majority of people tell me they anticipate that indifference will prevail, if not outright rudeness.
But, in today’s always-on world of the Web, these old-school approaches to sales and service need not be the norm. Modern businesses recognize that buyers have access to real-time information on any product or service that interests them. Businesses are thrilled to wait until buyers are fully educated before finally reaching out to a sales representative at their chosen company.

Smart companies understand that people have choices about with whom to do business, and those companies are transforming the way they sell and service customers.

At the same time, the Web is a vast supermarket of customer information and intelligence. If a buyer is wondering how to use a product or wants to know if others have experienced the same problem and can suggest a fix, an encyclopedia of first-hand knowledge is easily at hand. People tweet their frustrations with the services they use, providing a perfect opportunity for brands to engage on customers’ time. Yet most organizations still force customers to use the antiquated telephone – and make them wait on hold for a representative rather than engaging them with digital tools at the precise moment the customers need help.

The best companies recognize that real-time engagement on social networks like Facebook and Twitter not only makes customers happy – because their problems are instantly addressed – but that those public discussions also provide guidance to future customers who may have the same concerns. Such attention to customers’ needs serves to brand those companies as ones with which others will want to do business.

Today it’s up to the customer when they want to engage a salesperson. If I’m interested in buying something, I go to the Web, to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, and ask my friends and colleagues and family members for advice. I go to a half-dozen Websites and do research. When I’m finally good and ready and I’ve built up my body of knowledge, I reach out – typically through email – and say, “Hey, I’m interested in going to the next step,” and almost always the salesperson who calls me assumes I know nothing. Most organizations are still using traditional selling and service models that were developed decades ago. This needs to change, or your organization will suffer.

Excerpted with permission of the publisher Wiley from The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business, by David Meerman Scott. Copyright (c) 2016 by John Wiley & Sons. All rights reserved. This book is available at all booksellers.