You can take this tip to the bank! Salespeople have always displayed varying degrees of responsiveness to client needs but today, this quality damn near seems to be a lost art. And, if you are dealing with a client who demonstrates a high sense of urgency, this characteristic isn’t even optional. If you want their business, you too will need to step up your pace. Let’s look at this another way. In a competitive situation, with all things being equal, who will get the business? Will it be the “highly responsive salesperson” or the one who “gets to it when it is convenient”? If you chose the latter … I sure hope that you will be more successful in your next selection of a career.
What is responsive? Actually, it is a lot of different things, It is …
- Setting realistic expectations for the client and then exceeding them
- Getting back to somebody if they have placed a call or sent an email and doing so as soon as you possibly can
- Saying that you will find out the answer to a question and then making every effort to do so and report back to your client asap
- Proactively keeping your customer abreast of everything that is going on with their project and that includes the good stuff and the bad
- Being available on weekends and evenings
“Whoa! Weekends and evenings are my personal time!” That’s entirely up to you and I get that. What I am saying is that you will earn more business if you consider at least a partial integration of this availability into your schedule. Your call, not mine. Certainly, if you are new to your position or you are tying to build a business or a book of business, and your cupboard has nothing but “mac and cheese” and “cheese and mac” … you figure it out.
We have run behavior and motivator assessments on a ton of salespeople and I will tell you this. The best ones (particularly those who are required to generate new business) will consistently display high levels of competitiveness and urgency. They are also strongly motivated by bottom-line results. They rise to the top of their profession and above the standards of their competition and their customers recognize that too!
