Why do companies hate their customers?

This is one of those “well, duh” issues, I guess, but the dichotomy between what companies say and what they do is simply astounding to me. Much like what the dichotomy between what politicians say and do. And we all hate politicians, but we can vote against companies (and their practices) with our dollars and yet, apparently, we don’t.

If you look at virtually any company’s website or annual report, you can find their mission statement and after you get done with the junk about “empowered employees saving the earth” you will find out that they really, really respect and cherish and love their customers. Turns out what they really, really respect and cherish and love is their customer’s money. And they will lie and cheat and deceive to get it.

Now you’d think that all this lying, cheating and deceiving would be kind of a turn off for customers, not to mention kind of illegal. But no.

For instance, how are rebates not a “bait and switch”? Did we say that was $49.95? Well yeah, you pay us $150 today and if you complete these seven steps in the exact order we tell you and slice and dice the box it came in just so and send the whole mess in before midnight tonite to Young America, MN, we might send you a check for $100.05 in 4 to 6 weeks. So obviously the $49.95 is a lie. If the real cost, across the board was $49.95, that’s what you’d pay at the store and be done with it.

People don’t complain about this because they’re all sure that they’re gonna do the seven steps, etc. But we all know that the only reason companies do this is that some good portion of the populace won’t do the seven steps before midnight tonite, so the company gets to keep the $100 and 50 cents. If you really loved and cherished those folks would you be trying to hose them out of $100.50? You would not. Clearly your money is more important than you are.

My last point on rebates is this: it’s not like just one or two companies are doing them, there’s hundreds. And they ALL think you’re a schmuck. How does that make you feel? Cherished?

OK, rebates are an easy target, but there’s tons more proof that there are companies that hate you and will do virtually anything to get a few more bucks from you, while at the same time proclaiming their love for you.

OK, time to name names (but just for illustrative purposes):
Macy’s – my wife is a fine and long-term Macy’s customer and constantly gets 15% or $10 off coupons. Can she use them? Of course not, because the things she’d actually like to buy are excluded from the coupon’s discount. Would it kill Macy’s to give out a 15% off coupon with no limitations to its good customers? It would not. But why do that when you can lure them into your store and wring out a few more dollars?

Wireless Companies – I was gonna say AT&T, but they’re all the same. Is there a real problem with offering a plan with 1500 minutes for, say, $99,95 month, all in? Of course not. They advertise $99.95, but is the actual bill ever $99.95? It is not. If you respected your customers, you’d actually give them what you advertise. And make sure that you let them know before they ran up a bazillion dollars of overage charges. I’ve gotten text messages from AT&T advertising stuff but never to alert me that I’ve gone over my monthly allowance. Technologically impossible? I think not.

Credit card companies. You probably think I’m going to rail against 20% interest rates or the fact that years of loyal card-ownership go out the window if you’re three days late one month. Well there are those things, but frankly we all know those things going in so they don’t really fall into the “screwing your customers with malice aforethought” category. But this does: You know those checks you get, monthly, offering low, low interest rates if you use them to pay off other high-rate cards? Turns out that this is not the great deal you’d think – it’s a ploy to insulate, and increase, the debt you owe (at 20%) from ever getting paid off. How’s that work? Here’s the fine print - the debt you roll over at 2.99% gets paid off first, so that $500 you send in every month doesn’t reduce your high-interest debt at all. The highest rate debt gets paid off dead last. Nice.

Now believe me, I get the profit motive (business major!) and I also know that these companies have probably done cost-benefit analyses that support, on paper, screwing over your customer base to make a few bucks.

What I just really just don’t see is why companies feel they’ve got to lie to be profitable. And here’s my real problem – there are people (not companies) making these decisions. Do the people making these decisions know the people who write the mission statement? My fear is that they’re the same people.

It just goes to prove that Mencken’s phrase “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public” is, sadly, still true and that, sadly, there are still people willing to exploit that fact.

Jeffrey Gitomer has it wrong

If you read any business blogs or papers, you’ve probably seen Jeffrey Gitomer, he’s all over the place giving his (pretty gruff) advice on sales and his big tag line is always: “People hate to be sold, but people love to buy”

People don’t love to buy. Well, OK, some people do – my wife loves to buy shoes, but even then she frequently has buyer’s remorse and even more frequently, returns them. From a salesperson’s point of view, not exactly a success story.

In the corporate world, people certainly don’t “love” to buy – they have to buy. They have to buy a new phone system, different software, a new health insurance plan. Are these things people love to buy? Not so much.

If they “loved to buy” why is so much time taken up presenting, convincing, cajoling and overcoming objections?

When you buy you have to deal with the cost of the new item/service, the pain of implementation and the possibility of failure. As a sales person, if you could offer something where you could say “Tomorrow we’re going to implement the new system which will add all the new features you want, take away all your pain points, do it for slightly cheaper than you’re paying now and we’re going to do it with the flip of a switch.”

Does this sound like something you sell? Anyone?

I will agree with the “hate to be sold” part so (obviously) you’ve got to address the prospect’s needs, wants and fears in the manner in which they want them addressed and make them feel as comfortable as possible with their decision. Make it as painless and as positive as possible.

So the line ought to be “People need to buy, but hate to be sold”.

You heard it here first.

The Metrics of Metrics

We all know that using metrics in a sales organization can be a great thing. After all “what gets measured gets done”, and there’s lots of things we need to get done in sales.

So naturally the first issue is figuring out what you want/need done. Closing more sales is usually the main objective, but there may be others – customer satisfaction, brand awareness, functional cross-selling etc. that may need to be done either on an on-going basis or for limited periods of time. So what you want done can change over time. The next step is figuring out a) which activities directly contribute to your end goals, b) which of those activities are measurable, c) what the measurement is gonna be and d) lastly which activities will get done anyway even if you don’t measure them. This last one may seem weird but you can’t measure everything so why bother your reps having them track something they’re going to do anyway. You also don’t want to be redundant in asking your reps to measure something you can get from other sources – for example, if you get a report showing how many quotes each rep has, you don’t need a metric for that; you already have one.

Whatever metrics you choose to implement should be designed to encourage the actions and behaviors you want in your reps – actions and behaviors that directly lead to more sales (or whatever else your desired end result is). If your best practices show that presenting a proposal face-to-face, rather than via snail mail or e-mail, results in higher closing ratios, measure f2f meetings. If your studies show that prospects close more consistently if you respond to their RFP in under 36 hours, make speed your metric. Whatever you want reps doing better and more consistently is a good activity to measure.

But there can be pitfalls to metrics, too.

First and most egregious, is making the tracking of metrics time-consuming and difficult on your reps. Many of your reps, especially the most successful ones are a) already doing most of these things and so see the tracking process as redundant or b) are successful without doing these things and can’t understand why you’re cutting to their selling time with new reporting. So it’s gotta be painless or so important that it’s worth the pain – theirs and yours.

Second and only slightly less egregious is instituting metrics that you can’t clearly show are valuable in closing sales. For example, making all the reps in your organization make 25 calls a week on an unproven sales channel is a recipe for disaster. Unless you know for a fact that firms have successfully sold essentially similar products in this manner in this channel (or better yet, you have reps that have successfully sold your product in this manner in this channel), do not make this a metric. Attempt it on a smaller scale in order to prove its success. Once you do that, you can roll it out to the company as a whole.

And don’t be afraid to change. If something starts working for one area of the company or one geographic location, spread it around!

Instituting good metrics is one of the best methods you have of ensuring the spread of, and consistency in, the use of your firm’s best sales practices so that everyone can perform as an “A” level rep.