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The Sales and Service Disconnect

I write about strategies to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I also share ways to use real-time strategies to spread ideas, influence minds, and build business.

Worst Practices  |  New Rules of Sales & Service

shutterstock_137161697Here’s something curious: Many companies have completely different cultures and procedures for their customers depending upon which department is interacting with them.

The manner in which salespeople engage potential new customers when trying to win new business is often light-years removed from how these same customers are serviced by the company only months later.

It’s no surprise that in the course of my research for my book 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 I learned that this strategy doesn’t produce good results.

You win customers by focusing on their needs. You keep them the same way.

Focusing a great deal of attention on buyers during the buying process and then relegating that same buyer to poor postsale service means customers are far more likely to leave. This can lead to a churn cycle in which companies add more sales resources to replace the customers who abandoned them, and around and around it goes.

You keep customers happy, not by doing something different from how you won them in the first place, but by doing exactly the same things that won them in the first place. Shifting strategy doesn’t work.

Techbuilt