Category: Uncategorized

If you were reading this blog out loud, how would you pronounce the title?

Would you say ‘yee oldee order’ or ‘yee old order’..?

Well, actually both would be wrong because the letter y in this case isn’t a letter y, it is in fact an old English letter called a thorn. It’s pronounced th as in the old order. We can use this fact to impress tourists, next time we are visiting Ye Olde Shoppe at whatever place takes our fancy.

Always good I think to challenge assumptions and replace them with facts and such is the way with sales activity too.

One of the first things I learned, when a very green business development manager many years ago, was that half the time people fail to close a deal simply because they don’t actually ask for the order.

Instead they deliver their presentation with panache and then retreat to wait for the order to arrive.  If it does turn up they claim a success, but if it doesn’t they assume there was no chance anyway and move on to the next opportunity.

This seems a bit arbitrary to me. People like to be sold to. They enjoy the attention afforded to them and the time taken to explain things and to have their questions answered. Whenever I have visited a local market it always seems that the stalls doing the best are the ones who engage people, offering product tasters and inviting conversation. 

The stalls with vendors hiding quietly behind their wares do less trade, as people pick up the psychological waves of discomfort emanating from behind the jars of jam, or piles of pasties.

I’m sure we have all been there and despite being interested in some tasty comestibles, have walked past and purchased a nibble from a stall further down the line.

It really doesn’t matter what our business is, whether it’s jam or jet engines. We can all ask for the order. We can all take a breath, offer the product and say:

“We have a special deal today…buy one jet engine and get one free! How many would you like?”

Of course that example might work better with jam, but you get the picture.

We can choose to close the deal. We can be assertive. We can find the words to test someone’s committment to purchase and make sure we chalk up another success.

We can also know that if they are not going to buy we won’t put them off by asking for the order. Unless we are crashingly rude, or insensitive, us asking does not change the outcome. It merely gives us information that we can respond to.

We can ask for ye olde order! And if we don’t then someone else will!

Next week: Dr Blue Sky

Making a fruit smoothie seems like a lot of hassle to me, and besides, lacking any kind of automated fruit whizzing device I’m not sure a potato masher would cut the mustard.

Instead I happily buy smoothies and consume them with healthy pleasure until one day a couple of weeks ago, disaster! My bottle of fruit mega berry surprise had some mould on the top. Not the surprise I was hoping for. As the cap hadn’t been tampered with, it was clearly a manufacturing fault, I emailed a photo and a polite note of complaint to Innocent.

A few days later an envelope turned up. The address was handwritten and inside I discovered a pile of vouchers and a neatly handwritten postcard, which even included a sketch of a sad smoothie and a happy person flying a kite.

Cute? Or overkill?

Cute for sure and an interesting way to add a personal factor to their customer service. It made a pleasant change from receiving a standard automated letter and a lonely voucher, and given the time taken to update and print a letter, a postcard was probably just as time efficient.

Compare that to a recent experience on eBay. My son had ordered a Pokemon game which arrived on time, but turned out to be as fake as the wood used inside Japanese cars in the 1980s. We contacted the seller, by way of a pithy note of complaint, and waited for them to do …absolutely nothing.

Although eBay should refund the cost in due course we now have to slog through their complaints system which has many options on it, apart from a big red button marked ‘item was a fake so give me my money back right now and kick the seller off the site.’

The net result of these two stories is that I continue to buy Innocent smoothies, happy in the knowledge they care about their customers …and that none of us here are likely to use eBay again in a hurry. If ever.

A personal touch makes for great customer service. A website complaints system that loops round and round and lacks responsiveness makes for poor customer service. We can choose for ourselves how we respond to our customers and clients and maybe it’s time to forgo an easy email and instead reach for an ink pen, some quality plain paper and take the time to write. 

What else could you do this week to make your clients feel valued? Take them out for free coffee and cake? (Green tea for me please).

Remember that every unhappy customer tells at least another 20 people about their experience. Sometimes they even blog about it!

Next week: Ask For Ye Olde Order