This article is a continuation of the earlier article in below link: https://beyondobvious.in/the-success-mantra-s-m/
“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care” – Damon Richards.
Above words are old but the relevance, not diminished even a bit. Rather the importance has grown over the years. Today we not only talk about customer delight / customer satisfaction we talk about customer intimacy.
The word intimacy can arise some strange feelings but nevertheless has become a most popularly used jargon.
This phrase is fast becoming popular in the organizations and for quite obvious reasons. But, how do you actually achieve it, how do you make customer interested in you, so much so that – we can call it intimate. Not literally.
Well find below 5 ways that this can be addressed with:
1. KNOWING:
In today’s world knowledge is the key. You have to know in and out of the customer organization: the environment within, decision makers, catalysts, influencers.
The only way to achieve this is talk to a lot of people and on lot of different topics, official, unofficial, at times personal. This collection of information should give you three or four major links to work on.
It’s just like all sales people talking to your kids when you go for shopping.
2. MAPPING:
Map each person you had talked to from operator level to all the way to the top person. Find out the people with whom you can easily gel with, People having similar interests, living in nearby localities, friend of friends, etc. Build on this relation – Genuinely.
3. BUILDING:
This is the most important step. Try with at least 5 different people at different hierarchy in customer organization. You may lose in some and win some.
Visit them often, inquire genuinely about their kids / parents. Share your experiences about a good destination to picnic / a great movie to watch / good course for their kids. Remember important days like Birthdays / Anniversary and wish them. Wish them on their festivals. In short – Build on the acquaintance to bond it to relationship.
4. STRENGTHENING:
This entire exercise will be a futile and counterproductive if the effort is not genuine.
I have seen many sales people, start this activity with enthusiasm and then leave it in the middle or are not genuine enough.
This will not help if you focus on just getting information, you will have to build the relation before. The tree has to grow to yield fruits.
You can be assured that you have a healthy relation – when you start receiving wishes from your customers, when they open up topics of discussion that you like. When they start being informal to you in meetings, when they make space for you in their schedule without appointment.
This is last but one step to achieving Customer Intimacy.
5. INTIMACY:
This is actually more of an implementation step. When you have genuinely done the earlier 4 Steps, you will be in supreme command at the customer. The information will flow to you rather than you following up on the same.
People will call you to give you important bits of information like changes in organizations, change in company policy, future challenges, aggressive competition proposal, end customer issues, etc.
You will have the liberty to pull the person any time to the side and ask those critical questions on which you can actually leverage the crucial decisions.
These steps should help you have a lot of important information, considerably easily & lightning fast.
Achieving a good intimacy with customer is no rocket science; it’s just simple man management. Where people mess up is, they want the information too early or they do not seem genuine and in both these cases lose is for long term.
Next step to customer intimacy is having sensory intelligence. click the link to know about 5 ways to build sensory intelligence: https://beyondobvious.in/5-ways-to-build-a-strong-sensory-intelligence/
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