S1E8 Successful Customer Engagements

Successful Customer Engagements are the basis for success in every business. CEOs must be aware of what is happening at the customer interface and ensure they are driving their organisations to create customers.

Join me on this Podcast to learn more on making your customer engagements successeful when I interview Roger Watson.

Roger is a highly experiences Sales Consultant, ex National Sales Manager of major consumer brand products, and a highly successful sales person. He offers his insights into 3 key aspects of ensuring Successful Customer Engagement.

There is something in here for everyone that is responsbile for a business' success, from the CEO, through to the Executive Leadership Team, and on to the customer facing people of all disciplines. The reality is, no matter where you are in an organisation, if you don't see that "you are in Sales", you are missing the point. The Purpose of Business is to Create Customers! (Peter Drucker)

For more information relating to the podcast and how you can gain access to advisory services to assist you with your business, see www.lseconsulting.net.au

Transcript

CEO Thinking Episode 8

Successful Customer Engagements with Roger Watson

27th March 2024

Transcript

Welcome to the CEO Thinking podcast. I'm Philip Belcher, a successful CEO and CEO, mentor, advisor, and business consultant. On this podcast, I provide insights to inspire ideas for CEOs, directors, and senior managers to use as they lead their businesses to achieve outstanding results.

I've applied these ideas to start, grow, turn around, and successfully exit businesses as well as to mentor my clients that have achieved great results. I regularly host eminent special guests who share their experiences and ideas to inspire CEO's. 

If my guests and I can use these ideas successfully, you can use them too. 

In the previous podcast, Episode 7, which I suggest you go back and listen to if you missed it, I focused on three key foundations for business success. 

Those were strategy, structure, and culture. Each of these must be focused on for successful engagement with target customers for business success. I've previously quoted Peter Drucker, the management icon, who stated in his seminal work ‘The Practise of Management’, that the “purpose of business is to create customers”. 

Engaging with customers is a full contact sport. It's well and good to theorise about how to create customers, but there is no one better to discuss the topic with than a highly successful sales leader that evolved from being a highly successful salesperson. In this programme, I'm privileged to be speaking with Roger Watson, a sales expert, to offer his advice based on his decades of experience, which ranges from being a successful salesperson, through the national sales manager for several top tier brands, and now in his own right as a sales trainer, coach and consultant.

There's a wealth of areas that Roger could address in successful customer engagement, but sticking with the CEO Thinking format, we will cover 3 areas. 

·       The first being why your customer is talking to you; 

·       The second, standing in the customer's shoes as opposed to pushing your offering from your mindset; and then the 

·       Third being asking for the business and averting buyer remorse, which is also known as cognitive dissonance, so that the customer is happy, the sale is solid and they provide referrals based on being delighted.

Before we get into discussing the three topics, let me give you a bit more of a background on Roger. 

He started his career as a highly accomplished musician, then using his talents for engaging people he started his career as a salesperson in one of Melbourne's leading music shops, Lou Toppano’s selling instruments. He progressed to sales in white goods and then on to various consumer goods, all targeted at the retail market. Based on his talents and successes, he progressed to the national sales management of several tier one consumer goods vendors. 

He took the decision to move into sales training, coaching, and consulting, which he continues to this day. Further than that, he also has his own community radio show called a Musos Music in Melbourne on 96.5 Inner FM that you can stream on Mondays between 2:00 to 4:00 PM at www.innerfm.org dot au. Add to that, Roger is an accomplished magician with a wry sense of humour. I'm sure you're going to gain a lot from this programme and hearing Roger's perspective on the three topics. 

Philip: Roger, welcome to CEO thinking. 

Roger: Thank you, Phil.

That was… Is that really me? I sound fantastic. Thank you for that, I might send it to my son.

Philip: There you go. So, Roger, as you know, on this programme over the last; we've been going now, this is Episode 8, we've been talking about what it is that our listeners can leverage to work towards making their business successful. We've looked at choosing or identifying your key competence, then choosing a market that will value that key competence, and then targeting down on customers who will value what you're offering and potentially pay a premium for. Roger, in talking about this with you, you had three key points that you shared with us and the first one of them was that we need to understand why the customer's talking to us. So, could you tell me more about that?

Roger: Yes, well, I guess if you've done everything right, and I did listen to last week's show, listened to them all, but if you've been successful and the customer’s actually got in touch with you somehow, might be over the phone, it might be an email, and in a retail sense, they just turn up in the store, now what's different to many years ago is that a lot of those people have put a lot of research in because the Internet allows us all to go and study and have a look up and compare, even before we start to buy. Whereas in the old days, you just turned up at the store. Now I'll talk a little bit about retail cause I've done a lot of retail and the nice thing about retail is the customers come to you and you need to know why. Why did they ring you? Is it because you're called Aardvark and you just happen to be first in line? Or did they say, OK, I read the Google reviews. I checked out some other things, spoke to a couple of friends, reached out, so, the first thing any salesperson should do is not just leap into the spiel, but find out what's made this first decision by the customer, cause we're going to talk about decisions a lot, Phil, because it isn't a selling process and it is a buying process. But what we're actually doing is helping the customer make decisions, so the first decision they've actually made is to get in touch with you in the first place.

Philip: OK, OK. So, they've decided to get in touch with you, obviously the promotion has worked and got them in or they've walked past and seen your position, but that would be a very similar thing if you were a tradesperson and someone rang and said, oh, I've got something that I need you to look at. That would be very similar wouldn't it? 

Roger: Well you get a lot of places now that ask you to tick a box, “Where did you hear about us?” because. smart companies are trying to figure out, you know, the old saying, 50% of the advertising works, but 50% doesn't, I'm just trying to figure out the 50% that doesn't because we often don't know so this is the one way to ask. In a retail sense, you need to know. ‘Are you the 5th store that they've come to visit today and I'm just shopping around prices or doing whatever I feel like doing’ or have I actually thought ‘No, today I'm going to go to Harvey Norman, for example, I'm going to park the car, I'm going to walk all the way over through the furniture, all the way over to TV, and then have some person turn around and say “Are you right?” You know, you're ready to kill someone at that stage, I'd suggest, because we've come in with a reasonable amount of enthusiasm as a customer. We've made that decision based on whatever information we want. And so there's actually a fair bit of interest in a lot of cases that the salesperson's actually got to find out because their customers doing some work and it's ok to ask “What brings you to the store today?” or you know “How can I actually help you today?” And people, I've had people say “Well, listen, you can help me in fact, because I've got this idea in my head, and I think your product's going to solve this problem for me”.

Philip: Interesting. So just in asking that question, “What brings you to the store today” or if you're in some sort of corporate environment asking them the background as to what the potential issue may be that the corporations facing or asking them a little bit about their business and what's ended up bringing them to this situation of having you talking to them. 

Roger: Yes, that’s right. And in the old days, and I see lots of salespeople now not go through that. But at this point in time, the customer has to have done something to get in touch with you. They have to have seen an ad. They have to have spoken to somebody, so just ask them. “Great to see you” and get excited about it. “And how did you find out about me?” And so if you we’re doing a consulting job and someone rang you up and said “Oh listen Phil, I understand you do management consulting, tell us about it?” The first you'd want to know is “Ohh how did you find out. Did someone recommend me?” or “Yep I saw you did this or I listen to your radio show” and you've got actually some, I think the right word is, an opportunity to also create some rapport, but more importantly, you're asking the questions and you're getting the customer talking.

Philip: Right. OK. So you've moved from the potential of this person is merely ‘a transaction’ – “Are you right?” to this person will have requirements and will have done something that's motivated them to be talking to you. And then you're engaging with them at a personal level, not maybe too personal, but you're engaging with them at a level where they begin to believe “Oh, I'm talking to someone here who's actually interested in me.”.

Roger: Exactly. And so what we want to do, people love talking about themselves. We want to find out what their need is, what their want is. And we'll talk about those being different things because we've all bought things we don't actually need, but we just have to have them. Also gives you some idea of how much they were thinking of spending, what their motivation level is, what is it that they… do they need it today? People will often hold back a little bit with that. But of course part of this is helping them. Well, what I'm here for to give you a range of options and at least have you understand why you should buy one or the other? What are those options? Which one is actually going to solve? And you can't do that unless you actually know what this person's going to use the product or service for, and more importantly, what outcome are they hoping to get?

Philip: That's interesting, Roger. Many business people that I speak to at all levels, and I would say from one-person operation businesses through to small retail businesses, all the way through to major corporations and people who are in business in those major corporations, tend to have an aversion to the label ‘sales’ or ‘selling’. They may be subject matter experts in whatever their profession or their trade is, but actually when it comes down to getting someone to purchase what they’re offering, they tend to get a little worried about that and are a little scared of it. What I'm hearing from you is that if you talk to these people and at least ask the question as to what it is or how they've ended up talking to you, you then have broken into a conversation about them and the things that they're interested in or need, or want, or desire, so that you've now, you're not really selling to them as such. You're talking to them to identify how you can help them.

Roger: Exactly. I mean, when I speak to people, the two things that I do is increase profit and that will often be through sales and improve their customers satisfaction level. So they're the two things that I do, if I'm doing my elevator pitch, they're the two things. Now. If they tell me that they want to, and they've got an HR problem and I'm really trying to do that. Now I may not be the right person for them, so I can identify that very quickly and say, “Look, I've come here because I heard you're HR expert”. Well, I'm not where as, well if they come and say “We're trying to get better results out of our salespeople and make sure that our customers are happy, so that we're not selling…” And that this is it. People use the 2 words ‘selling’ and ‘buying’ in different ways. So when you're delighted, when you've just bought your latest guitar, you go around and show everybody and say, “Look what I just bought.” But if people are unhappy with their purchase, they go back to the shop, ask for the manager, and say “Your salesperson just sold me this.” So people use the word sold themselves when they're unhappy, so it doesn't... I've always said that my people that I deal with “Don't worry about what you call yourself. The customer will figure that out pretty quickly and they will be calling you either fantastic person, best salesperson I've ever met!” or “I'm never going back there again”. It's either one or the other.

Philip: Look, similarly, if you're in a service organisation, that is nothing to do with the sales and transaction, but you're offering a service, perhaps that are not-for-profit organisation, there is actually a similar approach to this in as much as the people that are talking to you are looking to you for some form of service that is helping them. And if you take an approach similar to what you're talking about here and start the conversation by asking them what it is that motivated them to come and talk to you, or what are some of the underlying things around why they're talking to you, you can then engage in a conversation that may make your transaction with them, in other words getting to provide that service to them, much more pleasurable for both of you and in a way, speed it up. Would that be correct?

Riger: Exactly, and the point is, there isn't any, there's no... Everyone talks about trying to get through the sale quickly. What you want to do is get through the sale properly. So to sum up this first area. It's this, the key thing’s you want to find out is why are they in the store? What is it that they want to achieve? What are the outcomes that they're wanting to get from the product or service because ultimately, we don't… You've bought a microphone, well, that's to actually make sure that the sound quality is good so the actual look of the microphone isn't as important as to what comes out the other end and how clear it is. So we want to know what are the outcomes that they want and the ‘why they want that’? Why is it important to them? Because the why is the motivation factor. We're going to talk about the next section: ‘Good, better, best’. So do I need top of the range or will an entry level product do the trick for me?

Philip: Where do we go from here? So you've got into, and engaged into a discussion with the customer. Where do we go from here? 

Roger: Well, this is where you have to do a bit of work and hopefully you're a bit of a subject matter expert if that's what's on your business card or whatever it is. But we're looking for something that's fit for purpose. You know, there's an expression used in lots of industries. But at the end of the day, if we just make it incredibly simple. I get people to say if you were this person and you've just heard everything that they wanted, where are you going to start? What would be one of the first solutions you'd come up with? Because in most cases there's a good, a better, or a best option and a lot of that's based around the price of things. So, if someone's a real expert. If you came in to buy a guitar from me at Lou Toppanos many, many years ago. You've done a hell of a lot of research. I've found out that you've been a guitarist, you know all your Les Pauls or your Stratocasters or whatever, I'm really just showing you where they are, so I know we're going top of the range. I'm not going to hand you an entry level guitar that we might sell the school students because you're going to probably whack it over my head. 

Philip: Do a Peter Townsend you think?

Roger: That's it. So we got… I think he was even belting up the expensive ones. So really at this stage you should have got some sort of idea at which sort of area, but for the people that don't know, we need to understand what is the difference between a good, better and best. 

And I've started selling TV's for a very well known (I'll say the name: Samsung) and so if you go into a TV store, you've got this wall of TV's that all look the same. So I would actually, because I do magic, that was actually my pitch in some ways to get chatting to someone, is to say “Have a look at those three TV's. I'm not going to tell you which is the good, the better, and the best. I want you to tell me. And if you do, I'm going to do a card. trick for you”. And so, this was my first part is because from a TV's point of view, that's something you're going to watch for the rest of the time, so that's your way of deciding what does it look like to start with? The sound probably comes in second. So in a lot of cases, people got it right. And then you've just educated them in the most simple way. If what is the difference between a good, better, and best TV. So one looks a bit cloudier, One looks a bit better, and one of them looks as though you're looking out the window, and they're priced accordingly, quite frankly. So, you've got to then make a decision is “What's important to you?” so this is where we get into the value equation of how much extra do I have to pay to go up each level. So you say “Look, each TV costs about $500 more than the next. So you can get that one for $1000. You can get this one for $1500 and you'd probably pay $2000, perhaps $2,500 if you wanted that one. A. can you see the difference and what's that worth to you? That's the simple part.

Philip: So you're asking the questions that are getting you rather than pushing one or the other, you're standing in their shoes to say “I'm understanding where you're at here, and I'm now on your side here listening to what you're thinking” as opposed to push, push, push. Is that what you're saying?

Roger: Exactly. You're helping the customer make decisions as we said very early is and so and I used to say to people, this is how you buy a TV, this is how you make a decision on buying it. And the other thing that I often say is to young people, particularly because a lot of people, salespeople, we learn, we teach in retail are between that 20 and 30 year old, and I used to say, pretend your auntie and uncle were in. You're chatting to them and you're also having Christmas dinner with them. And they'd look at me and say, “What's this guy talking about? Just an idiot.” And they’d say, :Well, what do you mean?” I said: Well? A. You would just talk to them normally, B. You would actually then explain it each to them and C. This is the most important part. At Christmas time in six months’ time, they're going to tell you what they think of this purchase. So they're going to be either highly delighted. “Thank you, Roger, for mentioning that better quality TV or that better deal that we could have had or the better level of servicing because we've really used that every time and it's been fantastic” rather than “What did you sell us that TV for? It's a heap of junk.”

Philip: Right, right. OK. So, by standing in the customers shoes, you're asking questions of them so that you are joining them in what they see as the best or joining them and understanding that whilst they might see the one where it looks like they are looking out the window. Underneath it all, they really can't afford that one. 

Roger: Exactly. Yeah. 

Philip: So you're understanding that with them. And then once you get that indication from them as to their reasoning as to why they're leaning then you can work with them to make them appreciate their own decision is that the way it goes. 

Roger: That's it. I've always said to salespeople when they've lost a sale. If you were the customer, which one would you have bought? Now, I've said before, 90% of the salespeople I ask that question don't know what I'm talking about and they say something like “Well, I wouldn't have bought either of them”. And I said “No, the first part of that question was if you were the customer, and the point is that most salespeople don't think like this. So all your questions are not around the actual product, it's around what are they going to do at home? Because when you're in a selling situation, often the salesperson is concentrated on the actual product telling you all the features: “It's got this it's got this. It does this” where the customer's mind is back at home or back in the workplace or in the plumber situation “Won't it be good when this tap just stops dripping. I don't need to know any more than that”.

Philip: Yes. Now I want to expand it from the specific instance of a salesperson. I want to expand this out to business owners. Now business owners range from a one-person operator who's quite often a service provider all the way through to a business person who sits on the Board (and I'm going to, in later Episodes somewhat demystify that term, because that's gained a mystique of its own) but who sits on the board of a public company and everything that you've spoken about here in terms of understanding the customer is applicable. If. you are at the highest levels, on a board, and you don't understand, you do not understand, what it is that are the motivators of the vast amount of people and organisations that are contributing to the profits of your company, but all you want to focus on is about the company internally and profit, profit, profit, profit and forget all about your end customers, you're going to end up like the salesperson standing in the store that you're talking to, Roger, who's lost the sale but doesn't even quite understand what the customer Is all about anyway. 

Roger: No. And you should be getting to this stage, Phil at the end, is even if the customer isn't sure, this is where you can actually say, “Well, listen, Phil, based on what you've told me, may I actually recommend this product to you.” So you've also got to have the courage. Now if you don't have that courage, the customer may as well buy online.

Philip: OK. So we're now moving to the Third Point, Roger. So we've actually stood in the customer’s shoes and we're understanding their motivations and we're understanding things from their point of view and giving them some assistance to manoeuvre themselves into acquiring either the product or service or whatever they're looking for. But then the Third Point that we discussed prior to this, take us into the area of. Making sure that A. you get the sale, but then make sure that it actually is a pleasurable experience that stays solved. How does all of that work?

Roger: Well, you should have done, you've gone through you’re A, B, and C - you're good, better Best, and you've said, “OK, well, if this one gives you a bit better, it looks better, it's going to be easier for you to use, and it's going to last you a long time. So based on that, I think that probably, what do you think?” And there's you're closing question just to find out. Now it doesn't, it's not a hard close. You're just saying “What do you think?” “Yeah, I agree with you. I think that middle one is all we need at the moment”, say “Great”. 

So at some stage it's a bit like the kiss goodnight. Remember, Phil? Now I'm going to take you back here. This is how I teach young people how to close the sale. When Phil and I were young, for all of those out there that are a bit younger, we used to take girls on dates, and you would pull up outside their house and decide whether you had to take them to the porch to say goodnight. Now American Graffiti, they probably do this in your favourite film, and at some stage you knew if they leapt out of the car and got back and shut the door and ran towards the door that the date was over. And then even when you got to the porch, you didn't know whether you'd say, do you kiss them goodnight or not? And it was very confusing. But at some stage you say, “Do you mind if I give you a kiss Good night?” That's what it's like for a lot of salespeople closing. You've got to ask for the kiss goodnight. And I've still got clients who say, “Have you ask for the kiss goodnight yet?”. And they've got their salesperson that's looking a bit nervous. 

And at the end of the day, it's always a question, “Which one would you like?” “Have you made a decision on that one or that one?” And, “Can we organise that for you today?” And this is where your delivery systems, all those sort of things, whether you've got people that come out and set it all up for you, all the other things that they might want that with it somehow. Now the ads on at the moment, you've created all that excitement, that if you've done really well, you might get “Take my money, take my money!” and you know, real life isn't really like that, but in a lot of cases, if you do everything right: “You’re right, listen, I'll grab one of those!” and that's the end of it. It's just a nice clear conversation. 

So this is where we've got to make sure, “OK, you're clear on that one? You understand what they do? Great. Let's organise that for you.” Now, once you've put that first sale away, the next thing that we talk about, and traditionally they called add-on sales, but one of the things that you want to be able to do is get home and use the product. We've all bought things in the past. When we were kids, batteries would run out on Christmas Day and the shops were shut for three days and we'd have to wait. Now, people tend to buy batteries. But you've mentioned earlier you've had someone that got a Wah Wah pedal. And of course you need the battery, you need the extra lead. What else do you need with that?

Philip: You need the battery. You need the lead. You may even need some music that that you would play to highlight it.

Roger: Right, exactly. So that, that effect that might be the particular song, you might even buy that person the CD and that they didn't have so they could hear it. But all these things. And I think I bought a video recorder once when my son was first born only to get it home and find there was no tape in the box and my wife at the time wasn't impressed. Guess whose fault that was? Mine. It wasn't the person’s in the shop. It wasn't the manufacturer's fault. It was mine. I've got everything else. I got the case to put it in, but I couldn't use this product when I got it home. So do your customers a favour. I wrote a podcast on this once, did a podcast on it. Do your customer in favour and ask for the add on sale. That's going to enhance their actual experience with it. It could be batteries, it could be a sharpener, it could be screws, could be a protective case. It could be, it could be an extended warranty, which we actually did want because I want this to last for a long time, so make sure that we've actually got the whole package together so that it stays sold.

Philip: Right. OK. So that's sage advice, Roger, and you can translate these messages into all sorts of situations in business. I have been involved in the sale of major solutions where there's high dollar amounts of technology that has been positioned with the customer that will solve their problems, only to find out that they're severely disenchanted and the reason they're disenchanted is not because the fit for purpose, as you mentioned earlier, about the boxes were not meeting their requirements. They were severely disenchanted because there was no project management of the implementation of the solution. Not only that, they're severely disenchanted because even if there was project management, there was no communication back to them about the progress of how things were going, and we've all been in that situation where we've been in front of a service provider, Professional services provider, whether they’re, they might be a medical. Or they might be a builder, or they might be in any phase whatsoever. And if you've scrimped on making that transaction with that customer and haven't built into it enough to provide that level of service, whether it's batteries for the child's toy, whether it's the lead to go with the pedal that you've bought for the guitar, or whether it's the. Project management and the training and everything else that goes around a major solution for someone, you've actually done them a disservice. And not only that, you've done yourself a disservice because in future, they're probably not going to want to come back and see you again. Is that the way it works? 

Roger: That's it. And this is what I mean by the expression “Stays sold”. I got that… I only I found that out when I was at Billy Guyatts. It's many years ago and I couldn't beat the top salesperson. And the boss said “No, Roger, we want you because your stuff stays sold!” and I didn't even know what he meant.

Philip: And you didn’t get returns.

Roger: Exactly. And that's what this ‘Stays sold’ is about. The Position sales process that I'll take you through on our next one in a few months’ time is one of the expressions in that is the ‘implementation phase’ of the sale. Did that go as expected? So whether I had to do it myself, or in fact, it was a big company where the air conditioner had to be put in. Was it dust free? Was it noise free? Did it take the short amount of period I expected it to, or was it absolute chaos? So, this whole part of “Was I delighted?” The salesperson’s forgotten you ages ago, and then, of course blames those people that have to do that part of the sale. But it's so important that that implementation stage, that's where the customer is making the decision about your company and is going to base their Google review on.

Philip: There you go. Rich advice? Roger. Thank you. So we've covered three key areas here on this programme.

·       The first one is that you need to understand why your customer is talking to you. 

·       You then need to get out of your position of thinking that you're presenting what you've got to them and stand in their shoes and understand, now they've made a decision to talk to you for one reason or another, now get in their shoes and understand what it is that they really need, what they really want, and then what their motivations are under that. 

·       And then the Third Point that you've covered there, Roger, was ask for the business, so understand how you're actually going to get them to now do a transaction with you, but make sure that you position with them and offer them a whole solution that they need as opposed to just selling something that they may then get disenchanted with and then want a refund, or want a return. And so that, yes, you might have made an initial sale, but really it doesn't only just become a return, it becomes a nightmare in as much as, and you said it earlier, Roger, people will refer to you and give you the good referrals online. But if you, and maybe one out of 10 will do that, but if you really get them annoyed, 9 out of 10 will get online and tell you how annoyed they are. 

So we've gone through those three points: understand your customer, why they're talking to you, make sure that you stand in their shoes and position it, but then make sure that you're offering a full solution so that they'll be delighted.

Roger: And I'll just add to that, most companies, and big companies, there's a lag factor. And when I actually get the product installed until I've actually gotten a valuation of that actual product, so did the leaking tap start leaking again in a week? Did the microphone keep working? Did it start humming? All of these things. So have a look at your Google reviews and I promise you they will tell you what the important time frame for the customer is. If I'm just buying food, then it's instantaneous, but for other more complicated sales, there's a lag factor. That's what you've got to link into and make sure you're having conversations with your customer about that time. 

Philip: Fantastic Roger, thank you so much. We've run out of time here, folks. You've got some great business advice there from someone who's been there, done that and been successful at it, and I'm sure Roger would agree with me. He and I and all of us continue to learn as we go along. So keep listening and keep working out ways that you can tune your approach. Even when you're successful, you can tune and learn more so look, thanks again, really appreciate it. I'm sure the people listening to this podcast really appreciate your input. I'll look forward to talking to you down the track on, you know, related topics as we expand on talking about business. Thanks, Roger. 

Roger: Thanks Phil. Bye. 

Philip: Cheers mate, bye.

Thanks for joining me for this episode of the CEO Thinking Podcast. 

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