David Jenkins & Associates — Getting Back To Basics With Sales And Customer Service

Getting Back To Basics With Sales And Customer Service

by David Jenkins

How many times have you seen a potential sale slip through your fingers? How many times have you seen customers expecting more and more from the service you provide without wanting to pay for it?

Sales and customer service are the fundamental activities in any business. Without them, no business can survive. The small business owner is under constant pressure to be smarter in how they sell their product or service to their customers while at the same time providing increased levels of service. How this can be achieved is by looking at the core concepts behind these two activities.

Selling is about providing a product or service that there is an identified demand for. Small business owners usually cannot spend time creating the demand; it has to be already there for them to tap in to. To properly satisfy your customer demand you need to look at two key questions:

  • Why the customer wants to buy.
  • Why they would choose to buy from you.

If the small business owner can tailor their sales strategy to answer these two questions they will become clearly focussed on customer needs and reap the rewards from doing so.

Once the sale is made and going hand-in-hand with sales is customer service. This is about building a relationship based on trust. This relationship is maintained according to how well the business continually treats the customer. The key to this for the small business owner is to decide how much time to spend to achieve sales that give a good return on investment for the service provided. Like sales, it comes back to two concepts:

  • How the business defines customer service determines the quality of the relationship it builds with its customers.
  • Each customer will expect a different level of service from that relationship. For instance, the more the customer spends, the more service they might expect.

A small business owner can use this as a guide to tailor the level of customer service given in accordance with the cost benefit the business will receive from doing so. The aim for both sales and customer service for the small business owner is to think smart and focus on what the customer wants and what the business can afford to do to keep the customer coming back.