Lesson Number III

YOU MUST BECOME KNOWLEDGEABLE ABOUT YOUR CUSTOMER’S BUSINESS

It is always amazing to find out most of us don’t even know what we are hauling out of our customer’s shipping facilities. It is hard to have a meaningful relationship with anyone if you don’t even know what your contact (or their company) does everyday when they are at work. There is some basic information you should find out and the guideline for some of it can be found in the preferences page of the customer file (screen 2). This would be a good place to start but don’t stop there. Finding out about the industry you are serving will not only help you become indispensable to your customer, it will help you figure out to what industry they are selling their wares, thereby giving you a whole new list of potential customers. Most every business today has web page and conversing with your contact coupled with having looked at their web page in some detail will allow you to make the most of every call. It will give you a platform from which to ask questions. People like to feel they are helping by providing information to others. This is a basic human emotion and a basic human need. You need to allow them to satisfy that need by making yourself a sponge, soaking up all the information you can possibly hold. Again, you need to put this somewhere accessible. Store what is appropriate in the customer file then save copies of emails or email yourself with notes if it is a phone call. We can later incorporate this into a folder accessible to everyone. For right now, getting the information and using same in your effort to grow your accounts is our goal. We need to take baby steps to get to where we need to be!!!

I will be crafting a checklist of what you need to know and some suggestions on how to ask for it.