“Treat everyone like a customer because you may need their help someday and everyone wins when they want to help you.” Lew Platt, former CEO, Hewlett-Packard
This was a key cultural component of The HP Way created by founders Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Platt often conveyed it, in his words. This culture was applied both internally and externally. Whether the person was a cafeteria worker, a customer engineer, or the CEO, we were taught to treat them like a customer. The same was true with external colleagues, whether they did business with us or not. This culture promoted relationships that would allow us to help and be helped when needed.
Do you treat everyone like a customer? Do you create relationships where people want to help you? Are you developing connections where people count on you and where you count on them? Here are four self-checks:
Are you unreasonably accountable?
When something goes wrong and the customer asks for help, the best salespeople try to help even if the problem wasn’t caused by them. They don’t blame or shame. Instead, incredibly successful salespeople are driven by the opportunity to help.
Are you predictable?
Many people prefer predictability over wild creativity. Certainly, they want the best ideas and solutions but predictability is what allows a customer to delegate actions with high confidence that they’ll get what they expected. The best salespeople deliver as expected or will predictably communicate why and how another option is better.
Are you anticipating challenges?
Experienced sellers anticipate hurdles and communicate them to the customer well in advance to avoid surprises. Even good surprises can be troublesome if not anticipated. I worked a project for a manufacturing company where the deployment of our hardware and software was completed a week early. We were on the critical path and the customer team that was dependent on us wasn’t ready. What we thought was a benefit ended up embarrassing that customer team which resulted in a disruptive trust issue.
Are you communicating good and bad news equally?
Good news is easy—bad news is hard. Customers see higher value when you proactively deliver bad news before they learn of it from others. During the same project referenced above, another critical path item was for us to train factory workers on the new applications. We underestimated how much the workers were attached to their old system resulting in unexpected time helping them understand why their management made the change. To avoid surprising management, we used a project team meeting to update everyone about the challenges, well in advance of the due date. We were rewarded by an accountable executive who personally helped us sell the solution to her employees.
Use these four simple self-checks to help you always treat everyone like a customer.
©2016 Rick Wong, The Five Abilities® LLC
