The most important person in any sales culture is the customer. My goal is that we create a sales culture that truly supports our customers. Now that we’ve gotten the obvious answer out of the way, we can really discuss the issue.

We must meet their needs, not simply do what they ask. In many cases, customers have come to us as the experts and need expert advice. If we fall into the trap of simply doing exactly what they ask, we relinquish the position of expert to them, which defeats the purpose for them coming to us in the first place. Still, when we develop a new product for a customer, my desire is that the process goes so well from a customer’s perspective that they are just as eager to work another project as we are. What better way to grow our business than for the customer to be ever ready with an answer to the question “what’s next?”

When I asked my team how they wanted our customers to feel during a project or upon placing each order they said:

• Confident
• Secure
• Informed
• Trust

We are building an environment and a culture to do exactly that. Two measurable metrics have been established in an attempt to quantify these feelings. One is time to process an order and the second is order accuracy. We chose these, because the best way to shatter confidence and a feeling of security is to struggle at the basic task of processing the customer’s order.  In our case order accuracy really measures how many orders fly through our process without a snag. Any time we are forced to revisit an order with a customer to request they change something or we were surprised by something they placed on the actual order it is considered inaccurate. All purchase orders are best processed when we can simply acknowledge their requests. When an issue does arise with a purchase order where we must make changes or something is delayed inside our process, that is when making the customer feel informed comes into play. This is less measurable and more best practice.

Working a new development project with a customer is much different from processing an order because the timeline is longer. An order should be processed in 1 to 2 days. Engineering projects can last anywhere from one week to more than one year. Keeping the customer informed to the point they remain confident, secure and builds trust takes effort. We earned the opportunity to work the project because they placed confidence in us initially. That feeling must be maintained by having great updates on accomplishments with next steps and real answers to concerns. In any business dealing, I encourage my team to share the truth. If I know the real situation, no matter what it is, then I can deal with it as unpleasant as it may be. Any time I am given information that is just meant to make me feel better, it masks the true situation so I cannot truly fix the problem. This only delays a disaster or perpetuates a problem. The same goes for our customers. They deserve to know.  Delivering honest, open dialog builds trust.

Our engineering development process and expertise is strong. Where we sometimes struggle is to portray that to the customer. Our process and eventually our sales cultural growth will make that second nature.

In all this, I don’t want to ignore the impact on our employees. The goal is not to meet the demand no matter the cost to us. I believe we can thrill our customers and have fun at the same time. The process needs to be enjoyable for our employees. Our business is built upon the development of custom products. We make hundreds of product design modifications each year to meet new application needs. We develop dozens of new products each year. The culture needs to be one of mutual support and understanding throughout the organization.   We call this process activation. If it is a solid process, where everyone works together towards the same end, it should be both fun and effective.