Keeping Selling Time Selling Time

I work with a wonderful group of sales people. Most of their time is spent selling and doing selling related tasks. These are versatile people with excellent communication skills. It is amazing how quickly they can be rendered powerless by a customer service complaint or any non-sales issue.

 

Selling is, in part, a people pleasing activity. We want to successfully engage others and getting them to like us, trust us and want to listen to us is a powerful tool to sales success. The mind set of most successful sales people is to offer products or services that are pleasing to the client. Most sales personnel are good at this process because they, in fact, want to be liked.

 

Customer service and complaints are often about conflict resolution. Conflict resolution, while drawing from some of the same skills used in selling, isn’t about being liked – it is about clear communication, negotiating and drawing boundaries.

 

Ideally, sales people should be left to sell and there should be someone else to handle the customer complaints and conflicts. However, in the real world, many of us in the sales profession are called upon to handle at least some of the customer service issues. For our own sanity, we can follow these tips:

 

1. Schedule a designated block of time to handle any customer service issues together. Grouping similar tasks together is not only a good time management technique, but we can pick up the negotiator hat and wear it a while. Once we are ready to move back into our selling tasks, we can be aware of the shift and move forward strongly to sell, leaving the negotiator behind.
2. Enlist help. If possible, let someone else gather some of the initial information from the client. This will allow them to defuse some, and become more amicable to resolution when we call.
3. Handle customer service issues quickly. The longer a client has to wait to have a complaint addressed, the more difficult they will likely be.
4. Have a plan. If we have a clear plan, a written list of your options for negotiating a given situation, it makes the process easier and usually faster.
5. Listen. Step one in dealing with ANY customer service issues is to listen. No matter how much we may already know about the situation and no matter how clear we may be about possible options, we need to give the client the professional courtesy of listening to their story.

 

Most importantly, remember to shift roles quickly and keep selling. Don’t get distracted and spend too much time or emotion on a non-selling task. The more time spent devoted to sales related tasks, the better sales person we will be. We are a sales person, keep selling.