Selling: By Nowell Wisch

Mike Marois died on June 6 and it was left to my friend Marc and me to arrange his burial and funeral. We were the guys who knew him well enough to do it because his sister lived far away and couldn’t do anything to assist. While the circumstances of Mike’s extraordinary life are an entire blog unto itself, for our purposes the focus is on what we do as a company to make life easy for our customers.

Because of the sheer number of complications surrounding his demise, Mike’s body could not be remanded to a mortuary or funeral home. I soon found that funeral and service notices could not be accepted by the newspaper except from one of those sources. I only found this out after a trek through the newspaper “Hall of Hell.”

The daily news is peppered with references to newspaper’s that are dying and expiring. The news is almost funerial in its self pity. What frosted my butt was that there was no way to get customer service in a timely manner in my time of need. The newspapers that relied upon my advertising dollar to survive made it almost impossible to spend that dollar with them.

For example, the LA papers website had a link to Obituaries but that led to 70 obituaries, not to the “how to place an obituary ad” section. In fact, there is no “how to place an obituary ad” section! How stupid is that? Not only is there no link to that information but the link to the “contact” phone numbers is so buried that it took eleven minutes to find it, ‘way down at the bottom of an endlessly scrolling home page. It was as though the management said, “We don’t want to stay in business by providing customer service. We want to go out of business so we can have a pity party for our demise.”

We always get in trouble when we think like a company. We never get in trouble when we think like a customer. If the newspaper had thought like a bereaved citizen then the result would have been a different story. It would have been the story of a $972.70 sale ($9.25 per 25 character line plus $300 for the photo) instead of the everlasting ire of a “never again” customer.

Does your company make it easy for customers to be customers? Do you look at every single point of entry into your business to uncover the pitfalls and bottlenecks that inhibit a customer’s business? If not, you’d better do so in a fat hurry. Like right now. Today. Time’s short and time’s a’wastin…. Now… go eliminate a few bottlenecks in your sales path.

Happy Selling!

I am traveling around China this week. It is a combination of emotions that are both complex and voluminous and too numerous to quickly describe. I need an entire article to make sense of the things I’m seeing and will write one for the website. The blog is a quick glimpse into the process.

If you watch carefully, you are soon aware that the message and the language do not always coincide on signs and billboards. Perry and Maria, my traveling companions, remind me that an English translation is a direct translation from the Chinese character. Therefore, sometimes the syntax, if not the entire message, is a little skewed. Naturally, as I write this, none of the examples come to mind but I will look at the photos and pick a few.

The point is that as sellers, it is more important than ever to insure that our message is translating into the language that our buyers speak. I don’t mean that we have to speak Spanish to Spanish speakers or Dutch to the Dutch. I mean that we need to pay more attention to the language our buyers use to signal their interest. If we are working with a 20-something that simply doesn’t care about establishing a relationship, then working toward a relationship-centric middle ground is useless, and probably counterproductive.

Over the next few posts, I will try and tie this together with examples from my trip. It is very instructive and probably more important than even I believe it to be.

Happy Selling!