We all know the old saying: “the customer is always right.”
It came out of the world of department stores in the early 20th century as a way to put some focus on what today we would call customer experience.
But given we are now a quarter of the way into the 21st century, it’s a concept worth reconsidering.
If you are solely providing what I would term customer service: i.e. customer wants 20 widgets tomorrow, you get the order logged and make sure they ship on time, then perhaps this still applies.
But of course, that’s no longer what customers are looking for from salespeople. Your website can do that. And once agental AI kicks off, even fewer humans will be involved in those kinds of transactions.
Today customers come to us not to buy a product, but to buy insight.
They know the outcomes they want, but they don’t necessarily know the most efficient paths to those outcomes. They look to us to draw together our knowledge of their business challenge, with our knowledge of the latest product and service offerings and our insight into industry trends and disruptions to give them the path.
This will often mean challenging their thinking. Even pushing back on what they may think is the right approach. This is often where we’ll add the most value, and it becomes the reason they want to deal with us.
Take a project we pitched for some years ago. The client was ready to commit to a major development project for the salespeople and sales leaders. Major piece of business, high stakes. We won it, designed a strong concept and got sign off (or so I thought). Two weeks out, I’m thinking we’re ready to roll and looking forward to the pilot.
Then we got hit with a curveball: “Can we see the final design?
Wait what? I thought we had already presented and had signed off on the design
“Can we go through the slides one by one?”
Ah, got it. Their experience of training in the past has been someone standing up and just working through the slide deck. They don’t understand how experiential training works.
So we took them through the slides as requested. Their feedback? “It feels light. We’re concerned.”
And this is where you need some steel in the spine.
They weren’t buying slides. They were buying impact. And we knew how to get them there, even when they didn’t. I knew this was going to work and was prepared to stand my ground and back our approach.
Post pilot they were enthusiastic advocates of our approach. “We get it now’
I knew they would.
Another example: online training. Post-lockdown, everyone was very excited about Zoom and Teams and wanted flexibility. And we started getting requests for hybrid delivery, a few people online, a few in the room.
We don’t do that. We’ve seen it fail too many times (I still have PTSD from attempting a leadership training with two people on Skype back in the day).
Training is about engagement and outcomes, not convenience. So we say no. All online or all in-person. That’s the line. Because we’ve tested it, and we know what works.
And that’s why your customers are your customers. Because they are seeking your expertise. So don’t be shy about sharing it with them.
For us, we know these are the customers we get the most value from partnering with – it’s where we can do our best work.
Dan Pink points out that the modern salesperson isn’t there to find solutions to customers’ problems – the internet does a pretty good job of that. The modern salesperson is there to point out the problems the customer doesn’t have the expertise to see.
So - the customer is always right? Maybe not.
The Germans had a different way of saying it:
Der Kunde ist Köing.
The customer is King. Kings are important; kings get listened to. And the best kings have advisors who will speak truth to power.
I can get on board with that.