Sales Made Easy

Ask any sales professional, and you'll hear the same thing: selling more of your product or service to existing customers ("inside sales") is a breeze. Selling to new customers ("outside sales") is much, much more difficult, and so requires correspondingly greater experience, talent, resources, time, and effort.

It just makes sense. Think of the sales process from the customer's standpoint - and we're all customers all the time, so this should be an easy thought experiment.

We have to feel comfortable before we'll buy. For good reason, salespeople scare most of us - we're afraid of getting ripped off, lied too; taken advantage of. Not just salesmen, but new companies make us uncomfortable, too. After all, the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And we get the shaft so often (just think of your cell phone provider, your bank, your credit card company...), most of us pretty much expect an ongoing hassle with many of the purchases we make.

But once that relationship is established? Then the sales pro has those same factors working for her: the customer knows you and your company. That relationship has repeat sales built right into it. Be it a retail store, car dealership, training firm, insurance agency... making additional sales should be a pleasure, a slam dunk, a walk in the park.

Of course, this is where Savvy Capitalism (aka shrewd business sense) really comes in handy. Because the customer's current and past experiences have a direct relationship on their next purchasing decision. Provide them an excellent product, give them shockingly good customer service, help them understand how your product can improve some aspect of their work or lives, and: boom! Easy as pie, you'll lock your customers in for life.

Drop the ball initially, and repeat sales are painful. If switching is arduous or even impossible for the customer (again, look at cell phones, banks, etc.), you'll keep most of them in the family - until your market changes and a more attractive alternative comes along. Then you're screwed. And rightfully so.

I enjoy outside sales a lot. I like people, I enjoy bragging about my company when I truly believe in it, and I get off on solving problems for people, which after all is what all ethical sales efforts entail.

But as I said, outside sales require much more effort than inside sales. So for me, the most logical solution to the question of building a business has always involved two components:

(1) "Let's sell more to our existing fan base!"

(2) "Let's inspire our current customers to evangelize for us - to brag to all their friends about how great we are and how well we treat them. Let's turn customers into eager salesmen!"*

If you look at how we built Coine Language School, you'll see exactly how effective this approach can be. With each client we brought on, we'd start with a small order - getting our foot in the door to prove ourselves, usually with just one three-month class.

Take Reebok as an example. We started with one English-Language (ESL) class for eight immigrant students at their distribution center in Stoughton, Massachusetts. The class went well. The hiring manager came to our school to learn Spanish, and that went well, too. She and her two successors each ordered more ESL classes for their workers. They also ordered Portuguese lessons for the supervisors in Stoughton, so these folks could meet their workers half-way, linguistically-speaking.

Better yet, water cooler conversation between the Stoughton managers and their peers at the corporate headquarters in nearby Canton led to requests from corporate for classes in Mandarin for a group of engineers traveling to China. We also taught Portuguese to the Latin American sales force, who spoke Spanish but were at a disadvantage in Brazil.

As I said, Reebok is just one such case. We started with one three-month ESL class at the quality control center of Legal Sea Foods in Boston, and continued with classes there for years.

Same with TACC, a small manufacturing outpost of Fortune 500 ITW.

Philips Lifeline brought us in to teach advanced English and accent-reduction to some of their monitoring center staff. We got more group ESL classes from that, as well as private lessons for their Chief of Information Technology.

Roche Bros. supermarkets was happy with their current ESL provider, but not delighted. So they threw us a bone, giving us one class while awarding six more to the firm they had been using.

The class went so well for us that we took over the entire account. Roche Bros. also expanded the program. We ended up teaching hundreds of associates in about a dozen stores over the course of a few years. Scores of those students are now full-time associates; dozens in management, all because they now speak English well. Roche Bros. benefited as a company far more than we did, and that's exactly as it should be. That's what customer service is all about.

When I published Five-Star Customer Service, Roche Bros. had me in to speak to seven different groups of rising managers. They knew by then that I had a lesson or two of customer service to share. As Roche Bros. is itself a five-star customer service icon, I took that as a big compliment.

Coine Language School went from two students in our living room to a $10 million valuation in only four years. We never lost a client to a competitor - not one. And we sure did win some clients over from our competition!

We did it all through a focus on inside sales, which is to say, through customer service excellence.

Outside sales are great and all, but if you run your company well - if you're as good as your outside salesmen say - then perhaps the Coine strategy will pay off for you as well.

Step 1. Get your foot in the door with a small initial order.

Step 2. Prove yourself as a company.

Step 3. Now that you're part of the family, an insider, reap the benefits through a long-term relationship with repeat (and escalating!) sales.

Everybody wins. That's why we're in business, isn't it?



*Paying customers referral fees, etc. is not at all what this means. This is free help happily given - and almost uniformly more effective than cheesy referral rewards.