Where Sales and Customer Service Meet

Shep Hyken interviews Frank Cespedes, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of six books, including his latest, Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World that Never Stops Changing. He talks about how sales and customer service is changing and how organizations, from the frontlines to the C-suite, can adapt.

Top Takeaways:   

·      Service for the majority of companies has been focused on the output of selling. However, those selling efforts are changing; one of the changes is that sales and customer service are increasingly intertwined.

·      Sales and customer service are very closely combined. Selling with service is all about what we can do to enhance the sales experience and make people say, “I like doing business with this company.”

·      Customer service people are increasingly involved in selling. Buyers in most industries are now online and offline multiple times throughout the buying journey. They are in contact with the company in numerous ways, not just with the sales team.

·      The days of the salesperson being an organic, walking, talking version of product and price information are gone. Customers now have access to product information, price, and price comparison in just one or two clicks.

·      People don’t want to be sold. They want to buy. Once they have decided to buy, they want to make sure they made the right decision. Everything that happens after the sale, which is customer service, is validation that they purchased from the right company, and they have a reason to come back again and again. 

Quotes: 

“You can’t manage a business from a spreadsheet. While you must consider the data, there is no substitute for the experience of  direct customer contact.”

About:  

Frank Cespedes teaches at Harvard Business School. He is also the author of six books, including Aligning Strategy and Sales, which was cited as” “the best sales book of the year” by Strategy & Business, “a must-read” by Gartner, and “perhaps the best sales book ever” by Forbes. His newest book is Sales Management That Works: How to Sell in a World That Never Stops Changing.

Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, New York Times bestselling author, award-winning keynote speaker, and host of Amazing Business Radio. 

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