Avoid being…What customers value…

Avoid being…a sales star?

Despite the obvious desire to be outstanding in sales, what we don’t want is to be “that” star soaper. You know, the one whose idea of territory coverage is to dash from an emergency on north side of his territory, to a scheduled stop on the most southern edge, then make a delivery on the east and finally end up making a prospect call on the west side.

Map that dude’s travel route and you end up with a pattern shaped just like – you guessed it, a perfect star! And in the end, he’s spent more time looking at his windshield than his customers.

While a good deal of windshield time is unavoidable, excessive drive time is. If we begin with a well-crafted territory coverage plan that groups our calls by geographic areas that’s a good start.

Then when that emergency causes us to make a detour, we can look at that plan and decide if we’d be better off shifting the rest of that day’s stops to those we already planned in that now detoured area for the following week.

In the end what limits our earning power is time. If we are able to harness its’ use wisely, we can maximize our productivity. Given the finite number of hours in a day, we need to try hard to absolutely do no less.

What customers value…And delivering it

If almost any customer is asked what single thing they most value in a supplier, the answer is pretty unremarkable. Even though they are likely to mention them first, it’s not really low costs, great results or outstanding products and service (although those are absolutely essential).

No, after drilling down through those, the single answer is inevitably reliability. Reliability to do what we promised. And of course reliability when it comes to all of those aforementioned essentials in the second sentence!

So it’s no secret then that following up to do what we promised and doing it when we said we would are both pretty essential. But beyond those clear dealbreakers we have to truly deliver what we promised-and occasionally remind our customers what those delivered commitments were.

Next up: Amplifying your reliability.