Customer Relations: Learning Versus Teaching

The fabulous Sethmeister had a post about a couple of Radio shack employees and the new way they run off their customers.

My first two thoughts were, (1) Why in the heck would you venture into a store that lost it’s usefulness a decade or two ago and (2) I don’t agree with his last statement.

I do however, agree that they should have anteed up a power cord with a smile and sent the customer home happy.

In his “listen-and-learn last paragraph”, where he usually teaches us a valuable lesson, he says,

” Here’s the short version: If you try to teach a customer a lesson, you’ve just done two things:
a. failed at teaching a lesson
and
b. lost a customer “

I’m sure he meant this as it pertains to this particular instance, but if not, I’ll have to disagree.

I teach my customers lessons all the time and they thank me for it.

If you’re a salesperson and you aren’t teaching your customers a lesson now and then, you’re shortchanging them and your sales numbers.

You need to be on the lookout for what your competition is trying to sell your customer and help them learn what to not buy into.

One way to do this would be thru white papers. If you need help with this, click over to my blog friend, Michael Stelzner’s blog and learn from one of the best.

I also try to teach them how to interact with the rest of my company ( customer service, truck drivers, AR,etc ), so they can make the most of our shortcomings.

Some of you will say they shouldn’t have to learn how to best use us, we should be perfect. To that I say – What planet do you live on ?

We hire from the same gene pool that you do. We aren’t perfect and never will be. Do we strive to be ? Yes. Do we weed out the less-than-perfect ones ? Sure we do. And we get another imperfect product of a world full of imperfect circumstances in their place.

The best case would be if we, as a company, would learn from our mistakes and from our customers.

But sometimes we hire people who have the deadliest trait known to man, as it pertains to assisting customers, the disease known as – KNOWITALLITIS.

Yes, one of the worst, most incurable diseases a human can have, KNOWITALLITIS is rampant in today’s gene pool of those looking for a job in sales and customer service.

One of the ‘most likely to succeeds’ I ever saw, was infected with this ugly disease.

He had all the tools that were needed for sales success, but he was never able to shed the traits that this disease reflects in a persons life.

He knew it all, he would not learn, heck, he wouldn’t even shut up telling us all he knew long enough for us to force the medicine he needed down his throat.

When a customer tried, in vain, to tell him what they wanted or needed or were ready to buy, all he could do was tell them all he knew about what they needed and wanted.

If you’d tried to write him a note with an order on it, he would have shoved it aside and would have kept on telling you even more about what he knew you needed.

That’s a far cry from another salesman I know. He never says more than his customer needs to hear. He listens at least twice as much as he speaks. He also sells about twice as much as everybody else in his company.

He learns from everybody and so should you. A professional salesman should learn from the wind, the rain, his dog, the cereal box at breakfast. Everywhere. Everything. Everyone.

The more I read about successful people in the past, the more I learn that they learned from everybody, instead of trying to teach everybody they came in contact with.

Try it sometime. Ask someone for their advice and then use it. You will have made a friend for life. And you might learn something.

Don't miss a thing! Subscribe to our RSS Feed or sign up for our e-mail updates (in the sidebar). To leave a comment, click on the post title, then scroll down to the bottom. Thanks!