You understand the importance of keeping your sales pipeline filled with your next sale, and the next sale and the one after that. It’s a fact: successful salespeople always have an eye to the future.
What does your future look like? Will you be with your current company two years from now? Five? If so, what will you be selling? Realize it or not, you play an important role in determining the products and services you’ll be selling in the years ahead. It depends on at least two things, both within your control:
The type of your feedback you’re collecting from your customers right now, and
How well that information reaches your Development team.
The type of feedback you collect from your customers is incredibly important. Due to the rise of social media like blogs and online communities, your customers have more influence than ever over your potential market. As Malcolm Carlaw points out in his sales article on customer experience strategy:
Virtual communities have given end users a voice unfiltered by management. The end result of this power shift is that end users have become more vocal and demanding about their experience.
If you as the salesperson are not monitoring the experience your customers are having with your company’s products or services, you can bet some industrious entrepreneur is, looking for the opportunity to bring to market the types of products, services and customer experiences your organization may be failing to provide. Never before have you or your competition had so much unfettered access to your customer’s feedback. It’s out there on the Internet, so collect it. Better yet, proactively reach out to your customers after the sales via phone, e-mail or the channels your customers are more likely to respond to, and hear firsthand about their experiences.
It’s not enough to listen to what your customers have to say; their feedback has to reach those who shape the products and services you sell. Understanding the customers’ satisfaction and frustrations, the features they are using and those they find useless, their “wish lists” and the items they are going elsewhere to secure; this feedback is invaluable to those engineering the next generation of your products and services.
There is a misnomer that if we chose to manufacture goods overseas, we lose the opportunity to capture user-feedback that’s essential to product innovation and evolution. In a recent article on how America can create jobs, former Intel CEO Andy Grove makes many good points supporting domestic manufacturing. Most of his points are based on sound economic reasoning, but he makes a subtle and incorrect assertion that (in the case of manufacturing television sets) “…we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution…” by shipping manufacturing jobs overseas. Much of what we ship offshore for production gets shipped back to the U.S. or elsewhere for purchase. It is unlikely that those involved in offshore production are privy to proprietary user feedback because we, the U.S. and other first-world countries, are typically the end-users for whom these goods are designed.
What is essential, and what I believe Andy Grove would agree with, is that we pay attention to the end users of our products and services. We solicit their feedback and make sure that it gets back to our product developers in as unfiltered and honest a way as possible. There are several ways we can do this.
Devoting a section of our websites to customer forums provides an easy place for consumers to share their experiences. We should want to hear it all, the good and the bad, and by creating an easy place for people to offer their feedback, we’ll get a front row seat as to the market place in which we participate.
Social media, such as Twitter or a FaceBook company page, may be good forums as well. The key is to make it easy for our customers to say things about their experiences with us, so employ channels that your customers find easy to use.
Want to control your image before it’s “out there” in public? Be the type of salesperson that follows up with your clients firsthand so that you can learn what they liked, disliked and didn’t care about in your product. Also find out about their experiences with the sales process, their post-sale support (if applicable) and their satisfaction at any and all customer touch points.
Keep an open channel between Sales and Development; not a constant conversation but opportunities to share information in an organized, efficient way. Schedule periodic meetings to discuss, face-to-face with Developers, the concerns and opportunities you see from the Sales side, and brainstorm for the best ways to leverage that information.
Post-sale follow-up turns out to be one of the most proactive things you can do to engineer your future with your current company. By following up with your customers, you are taking the first step toward your next sale.
