You only have one chance to make a first impression. You should start before a prospect becomes a customer because it is difficult for a company to hit the “first impression undo button.” At the same time, while it should be straightforward to make a great first impression, it happens much too infrequently. But treating your new customer like a new baby will be easier.
My Journey
I was the Vice President of Service for an analytical instruments company. Our products were very specialized and sold to people who often had at least a Ph.D. in Physics, Materials, or some other technical field. These intelligent people did not want to be sold to; they wanted their sales rep to treat them respectfully, provide relevant technical information about our products and services, and learn what they were trying to accomplish. Only when our reps reached that stage of customer insight did these people want to receive a quote for a combination of products and services that would help them accomplish their mission at the best cost (not lowest – best).
When our products were delivered to our “new” customers, we sent an engineer to the customer’s lab to install the equipment and train the new users. It was at this point that we first started detecting customer problems. These issues frequently escalated to me, and my job was to find out how our customers had expectations that differed from our published information and then come up with a mutually agreeable solution that did not kill this budding partnership.
As I looked over these all too frequent occurrences, I soon discovered that two of our sales reps were causing most of the problems. Working with our Sales and Marketing Vice Presidents, we developed a training program for all our sales reps, clarifying our range of products’ capabilities, options, and outputs. Within six months of the first training class, we noticed a significant drop in pushback at installation. At that time, I knew I was on to something. These two VPs and I started meeting to expand the sales training program to an onboarding program that my department would use with each new customer. And we did our design based on an excerpt from a new baby website.
Treat your New Customer like a New Baby
This table compares several steps of a new baby at-home process with how we wanted to treat our new customers:
http://kidshealth.org/parent/pregnancy_center/newborn_care/guide_parents.html#
We eventually created a group of checklists unique to our company and market area. The Sales part was presented to the sales team at a National Sales Meeting. The Service part had different information for each common touchpoint: scheduling, installation, training, technical support, contract sales, and ordering parts and consumable items. We worked very closely with the VP of Marketing because she was responsible for messaging (trade shows, website, advertising, special promotions, etc.). We took great pains to ensure our teams were very familiar with the company messages, what they meant to customers, and, most importantly, how to consistently act when in contact with the customers to represent our corporate brand message. We (I) then had to sell these checklists to my managers and help train all our employees. We initiated low-frequency, high-level telephone calls from a company executive to each new customer at pre-defined stages throughout the customer relationship. And we started a series of transaction surveys to identify problems as soon as they happened so we could fix the customer and update training to prevent a re-occurrence.
The Results of the Journey or Learning to Treat Your Customers Like a New Baby
Without going into great detail, we quickly began enjoying the benefits of our Sales and Services training and alignment:
- Our surveys show we have indeed created happy and loyal customers
- Our service contract revenue grew because the customers had confidence that we would do what we contracted to do
- Our Sales reps were delighted because they had more reference accounts
- Our Service people were happy because they didn’t have to put out “homemade” fires.
- I was ecstatic because I didn’t have to deal with all these disappointed customers.
- Our CFO was happy because our warranty costs dropped, and our selling costs also dropped because we were enjoying more repeat business.
- And finally, our customers were super happy because they could use the equipment for what they wanted without the hassles of calling support and either rushing to solve a problem or having to deliver some bad news to their boss – either about what was purchased or potential project delays due to who knows what.
We eventually developed a series of training courses, checklists, and customer surveys to ensure that things were going well when our customers were using our products. And we increased our referrals and retention while improving our organization’s overall morale.
You, too, can love learning how to treat your new customer like a new baby.
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About Middlesex Consulting
Middlesex Consulting is an experienced team of professionals with the primary goal of helping capital equipment companies create more value for their clients and stakeholders. Middlesex Consulting continues to provide superior solutions to meet the needs of its clients by focusing on our strengths in Services, Manufacturing, Customer Experience, and Engineering. If you want to learn more about how we can help your organization create a custom onboarding process where you treat your new customer like a new baby, please contact us or check out some of our free articles and white papers here.