Once an agreement has been formed and both parties part company with a solid commitment to follow through, there is still much that needs to be done. As any successful salesperson will tell you, the sale really begins after the sale. The reason is that you want customers to come back, and you also want them to bring their friends. Three things need to be maintained: the agreement, the relationship, and the plan.
Maintaining the Agreement
Maintaining an agreement involves two activities. First, and most immediately, make sure you hold up your end of the agreement. Nothing will diminish commitment faster than your not holding up your end of the agreement. If you don’t hold up your end, there is no incentive for the other party to hold up its end of the agreement, and the whole agreement is in danger of falling apart.
It is critical, especially for people with whom the relationship is new, that you seize the first opportunity, after you’ve reached an agreement, to communicate strongly that you intend to follow through with a high level of enthusiasm. This communication need only take the form of summarizing what was discussed during the meeting on a piece of paper and faxing it to the other party that same day, or calling the other party on the following day to let him or her know you’ve already begun to follow through on what you promised. This will communicate to the other party that you are a person of your word and that his or her needs, which are covered in the agreement, are going to be met. The other party now has every incentive to hold up his or her end of the agreement.
Several years ago I was flying on American Airlines from Albany, New York, through Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to Phoenix. The flight out of Albany was two hours late because of a mechanical problem, which meant I would miss my connection on the last flight of the evening to Phoenix and have to spend the night in Chicago. As the plane taxied up to the gate, I asked one of the flight attendants what kind of treatment I could expect from American Airlines: would they treat me with a sense of appreciation as I had just gone the extra mile for American Airlines, or would they give me a meal ticket for the employees’ cafeteria and tell me to wait at the airport until the next flight left in the morning? The flight attendant’s response was, “I don’t know. That’s not my end of the business. But good luck.” Needless to say, I had visions of a long and uncomfortable night in Chicago.
I got tothe American Airlines ticket counter at about 10:30 P.M. expecting the very worst. A very sympathetic and pleasant ticket agent greeted me and when I told him my name, he immediately gave me my boarding pass for the morning flight, handed me a voucher for the Westin O’Hare, pointed to where the limousine would pick me up in two to three minutes, and said, “I am very sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you.”
Talk about a pleasant surprise! I was absolutely shocked. The whole transaction took forty-five seconds and the treatment was strictly first class, as the room at the Westin was incredibly expensive. I learned that American Airlines enjoyed a substantial discount rate for a block of rooms at the Westin O’Hare that was set aside for passengers who missed their flights. Because it was nearly Christmas and Chicago was jammed with people, all the hotels in town were full, with people waiting in line to get in. As a result, the Westin O’Hare had been calling American Airlines and begging them to release this block of rooms so they could rent them out at full price. But American Airlines refused to do so until all their inconvenienced passengers were taken care of.
I’m not the only passenger with a story like this about American Airlines; shortly after this incident, American went on to become the largest airline in the free world. You can’t accomplish a feat like this if your customers aren’t talking about you and saying great things. I bet in the last several years, I’ve told more than 10,000 people about this incident. I’m probably one of American Airlines’ best salespeople and they don’t pay me one cent in commission or bonus. They just keep on giving me the same high-quality service I’ve grown to expect, especially in those situations where I am inconvenienced.
Skeptics are quick to point out that there is a cost associated with all this, and there is, but there is also a tremendous payoff. One recent study pointed out that it costsfive times more to go out and get a new customer than it does to maintain a customer you already have. Furthermore, over time, these well-maintained customers tend to tell others and bring their friends with them at no extra cost.
The second aspect of maintaining an agreement is critical for getting other people to stand in line just for the privilege of doing you a favor. The key here is that when someone goes the extra mile to do something nice for you, you make sure that you make this person feel so good about what they have just done that they can’t wait for a chance to do something nice for you again.
I have my cars fixed by an establishment called Don’s Repair. I was referred to this place several years ago by my brother. Although this place was a little out of the way for me, my brother assured me Don’s prices were good and when Don fixed something, it stayed fixed. Well, I must admit that Don not only lived up to his advance billing, he was also a nice guy. So I started referring some of my friends to Don. They were also impressed with the quality of Don’s service and began referring their friends. As a result, Don’s business began to grow rather nicely.
One day, I was driving around town when my car started making a chugging sound and began to lose power. Gently, I nursed my car over to Don’s Repair. It was a very busy day and I could see when I arrived that he had a lot of work backed up. However, when Don saw me get out of my car, he immediately dropped what he was doing and came over to see what I needed. I raised the hood and started the car so Don could hear the chugging noise. After listening for about fifteen seconds, Don informed me that I had a disconnected hose and that my carburetor was sucking air. He reached down and reconnected the hose to the carburetor. Sure enough, the chugging noise went away. Don, however, burned his hand slightly on my hot engine during the process. Then he put a clamp on the hose so it wouldn’t pull off again in the future.
The whole process took about ten minutes of Don’s time. As he slammed down my hood, I pulled out my checkbook and asked Don what the charge was. Don told me that as I was a regular customer, and it really hadn’t taken him very long, there would be no charge. I argued that his time and inconvenience had to be worth something and reminded him that he did put one of his clamps m my hose. At this point Don looked up at me and said, “You don’t understand, do you?” Being somewhat puzzled, I said, “Understand what?” Don answered, “You are the cheapest advertising I can buy. I know what you are going to do when you leave here—you’re going to tell your friends, and that iswhat makes my business grow!”
Don was right. He knew exactly what he was doing. To this day, I carry around a stack of Don’s business cards in my briefcase. And when anyone asks me if I know a good place where they can get their car repaired, the first thing I do is hand them one of Don’s business cards. Then I spend a few minutes telling them how great it is to do business with Don. I function as one of Don’s best salespeople and I sell Don very actively. I get him lots of new business, and I don’t cost Don one cent!
I get the feeling that I’m not the only unpaid salesperson working for Don. During the last three years, Don’s business has grown 600 percent and he has never advertised. It’s strictly word of mouth on the part of excited and satisfied customers. Doing business in this manner has also produced an interesting side benefit for Don. He almost never gets stuck with a bad check, because everyone who does business with him is a trusted friend.
Maintaining the Relationship
In addition to maintaining the agreement, it is also necessary to maintain the relationship. If you don’t maintain relationships, they begin to deteriorate and the level of trust falls off. Once the trust is gone, there is no possibility for genuine commitment. People don’t commit to people they don’t trust nor do they stand in line to do them favors.
Maintain a relationship the same way you start one: Spend some time visiting with the same people you deal with without asking them for anything. If the only time you visit these people is when you want something, you become known to them as a moocher, user, or taker. Eventually, these people will no longer look forward to your coming and they will take their business elsewhere.
My oldest child is a son named Philip. If we have spent time together and feel good about each other, and I ask Philip to mow the lawn, chances are he will agree. On the other hand, if I have been gone for a week and we haven’t seen each other, much less done anything together, and then I ask Philip, in that same loving tone of voice, to mow the lawn, the answer will probably be some form of no. He is saying to me, “Dad, you don’t care about me. If you did, you would have been here. All you care about is some cheap form of slave labor to get your grass cut!”
Several years ago, Philip came home from school on a Thursday afternoon. As he walked in, my wife and I asked him the usual questions about his day like, “How was school? Did you have fun today? What did you learn?” Philip’s response was to shrug his shoulders and walk into his room. My wife then turned to me and remarked that something was wrong between us and Philip. I agreed with her.
After looking at the PRAM Model for several minutes, I proclaimed that it was very definitely a maintenance problem. I suggested that we needed to get into Philip’s world and convince him that we were not the enemy. At this point, we could hear Philip in his room playing with his toy cars.
Off to Philip’s room we went. We got down on the floor with Philip, grabbed a handful of toy cars, and proceeded to make automobile noises right along with him. I have to admit that Philip was a little bewildered at first; the first thing out of his mouth was “What are you doing?” We told him that we just wanted to play with him for a while. My wife and I stayed in Philip’s room playing with him for forty-five minutes and all three of us really had a good time. And for the next few days Philip never stopped talking about what was going on his life.
My wife and I were thrilled. We could actually say that the relationships between us and Philip couldn’t be better. The trap that most of us fall into when we develop such a relationship, however, is to think it will remain at a high level with no additional effort on our parts. Nothing could be further from the truth. Doing so is what’s commonly referred to as taking people for granted. If my wife and I had failed to maintain our relationship with Philip for a week, we would have been right back where we started, if not further back.
Maintaining a relationship is a continuous process. Relationships are living arrangements between people and they have to be regularly fed if they are to remain alive. As one woman so eloquently put it at one of my seminars, “What you’re really saying by telling us that relationship maintenance is a continuous process is that you never ever really have it made, do you?” This is especially true when it comes to dealing with customers. The minute you take them for granted, they start looking for another place to take their business.
Maintaining the Plan
The way you maintain a plan is simply by listening to the people you have been dealing with. If you listen long enough and hard enough to these people, they will tell you exactly what it’s going to take to motivate them to give you what you’ll want the next time around.
As logical and easy as this sounds, most people are reluctant to do it. Most people don’t like to listen to their customers. As Tom Peters said, “We’ve developed a contempt for customers!” We don’t like listening to what they have to say because the only time they say anything is when they tell us what they don’t like about our products or services. They’re usually angry and venting hostility. Still, we must force ourselves to listen and listen hard because ideas for new products and services come to us via customer complaints about our current product or service.
One very smart car dealer in Madison, Wisconsin, epitomizes the active listening process and his efforts landed him on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. This dealer offered free cab service to and from work to customers who would drop their cars off in the morning to get them serviced or repaired. Offering such a service was a gesture that in and of itself caused him to get noticed. But the car dealer’s efforts went beyond this. Several times a year this car dealer would give dinner parties for the cab drivers involved. At these dinners, he would ask them what his customers were saying about him, his employees, and the way he ran his business. As the car dealer remarked in the article written about him, “If they won’t tell a cab driver what’s bothering them, who will they tell?” He went on to say that gathering this important information allowed him to stay in touch with his customers and one step ahead of his competition.
At this point, we’ve taken the Win-Win Negotiation process full circle. If we actively stay tuned to our customers, the planning step is virtually done for the next go-around.
