Tag Archives: sales

Are you a good PR / marketing ambassador for your company?

We all experience it.  We call a company with a question or complaint, are put on hold for seemingly forever, and then get a person who can’t help, is rude or simply doesn’t care.

In most cases when that happens, one would say the company representative is bad at his/her customer service job.  But while this may be true, they also are a bad PR ambassador for the company; a larger issue.

Every person who works at a for-profit company or nonprofit agency represents their employer, whether they know it or not and whether they like it or not.  When encountering a rude or unhelpful customer service representative, the customer doesn’t feel that person is simply bad at his/her job, it reflects on the entire company.  “I called XYZ company and got this incredibly rude person, I’ll never use them again.”

In the public relations workshops we do for companies, we make the point that every employee, regardless of how invisible to the general public he/she is, represents the company.  It is a mistake for a company to think that only the CEO and PR department are responsible for the company’s image.  Image and reputation is projected by everyone in the company, whether it is their “direct” job or not.

From the person answering the phone, to the person shipping the merchandise, everybody plays a part in the customer experience.  That’s what true customer relations is about, when every employee understands that their job is not only to do their job, but their job will ultimately finds its way to the customer.

This understanding starts at the top and is relegated and delegated down.  Top management must understand the importance of every employee doing their best, and then instill that sense of responsibility in every person who collects a paycheck.

 

 

“How are you” is a dead giveaway

We all get them.  Unsolicited phone calls at home or the office from people trying to sell us something.

The first hint that the call is a sales pitch is the caller ID. But then again, all of us get calls from people we don’t know and it might not be a sales call.  It could be a new client, a friend of a friend or myriad other persons.

But the “dead giveaway” that the call is a sales pitch is when the person calling, unrecognizable to you, starts with “Mr. ((fill in your name)) how are you?

When a stranger calls and asks how you are, you know it is someone who only cares about your health to the extent that you can buy what they are selling.

So why to boiler room sales persons still start with “how are you?”  Everybody knows that they are immediately telling you they are about to make a pitch.

All of use ask one another “how are you?”  And we say it to people we actually know and even perhaps care about.  But even then, we really don’t want to know how people are.  If our friends and acquaintances would truthfully tell us how they are, we would immediately turn around and run away screaming.

It is a polite courtesy greeting, not an in-depth inquiry as to how a person’s like if really going.  So we do it many times a day, hoping for the expected, “fine.”

If asking how someone how they are doing has become simple routine, then why would a salesperson care how we are?

So as a marketing consultant, my advice to all the phone salespersons out there is don’t ask me how I am.  You don’t care, and I know you don’t care.  Yet worse, it is a red flag that I am about to be pitched and a signal to say no.