The Life-Long Customer

“Something I learned early on in my career when I was selling with the Pittsburgh Pirates is: I'm not going to win every single battle, even though I wanted to. I wasted a lot of time as a young seller trying to go after those clients that I probably had no business going after because they weren't going to do business with me, even if I paid them to. It's just, look for the types of clients that believe in what you believe in.

It's not necessarily being a baseball, loyalist or a hockey loyalist, but they believe in what sports does as an entity. For us really we're hospitality to connect people to one another, whether it's connecting with your kids, your spouse, your clients, your friends, or just connecting with the team. What happens on the ice?

Yes, it's great. When we win, we love to win a ring every single year, and when the Calder cup here every single year. But what we can guarantee is a platform and a venue for you to be able to better your life and better your relationships. Those are the things that we can control.  Think when we go out and we self prospect. We look for new clients to come on board, we're hitting that home, getting away from the hockey a little bit, even though that is important. We certainly have our super fans here and we love them and they love us, but we can also be a fit for those that have other goals in mind as well, outside of just catching a great hockey game and being in an exciting venue.

 It really comes down to knowing what your product can cater to and finding that consumer that really believes in what we do as an organization.”

- Adam Vogel, Senior VP of Ticketing, Utica Comets, Utica City Football Club & Adirondack Bank Center

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“We had a team that went out to Beaverton, Oregon to meet with a small company out there. And we spent an entire day in a workshop, we're building on technical credibility and working with their teams and working through what a proof of concept is going to look like. We have an unbelievable series of meetings with different technical folks, business folks, et cetera.

And that all was being wrapped up in the traditional pre-COVID way of let's go out to dinner and get some drinks and enjoy each other's company and get to know each other more personally. So, we sit down at this great Italian restaurant and me, I think at the time I was 29 or 30, trying to be this executive and I was like, Oh yeah, I'd love to see the wine list.

And so I start to order and the most senior person from the company that we're meeting with kind of puts his hand up like this in the middle of dinner and was like, “we will not be drinking that!” And I was like “I thought this was a decent wine. It was like the second or third cheapest on the list.” I thought I was doing right by our company as well.

He looked at me and he goes, Chris, we're not drinking a super Tuscan. We're in the Willamette Valley, which is known for the best Pinot Noirs in the world. We're going to drink Pinot Noir. And I was like, all right, done everybody at the table, just kind of picks their head up. And it's entirely silent. And certainly put me in my place, but I will tell you that I have now become a Pinot Noir drinker since.”

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“What does it look like to be on the same side of the table versus different sides of the table? 

To give a really good example right now we're dealing with a sticky renewal and the engineering director who said "you guys are fantastic".I want to renew, we want a long-term relationship."

He's still on the same side of the table as us, but he's gone very quiet because obviously, we're in deep conversations with purchasing when negotiating with dotting I's and crossing T's.

 When you're on the same side of the table even in those contexts, you can rely on that person to pick up the phone, to purchasing and say, "call off the dogs this is the best deal you're going to get". 

You can rely on that person to give you insight about the rest of the organization or make referrals.

It's about cultivating relationships to become a coach. Someone who is not just trying to use your product, but it's actually trying to coach you to sell better into their organization. 

If you get that coaching relationship going then you know, you're on the same side of the table and you're gonna stick that way.”

- Ollie Rubens, VP of Sales, Undo

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"One of the things that have helped not just internally, but also externally with clients is John Maxwell's leadership training. It's allowed me to reevaluate what I do as a leader myself.

How I interact with my internal team, how I interact with my clients, and how else can I push myself to be better for both of them. Because obviously, the internal relationships we have are equally as important as the relationships we have with our clients. 

It's definitely been a good opportunity to be humbled and to think about how I can improve what I bring to the table with the people that I'm talking to every day.

Not just getting on the phone to get on the phone, to check in with them, how's the project going? 

Or how is the candidate that we placed doing? I feel like sometimes we do those things out of obligation, but going through the training has made me question, what am I doing?

What value am I bringing during this call and if I can't bring the value for the call, should we be having it?

Or is there something else I can help them with? 

Whether it's getting to know the internal team or my external clients. I always try to think about how I can help them.

That's one of the biggest things that John talks about in more than one of his books is everybody that you talk to throughout the day you're impacting them positive or negative. 

Are you a plus in their day or a minus in their day? And that carries with me quite a bit. I try to take that into every client relationship."

- Kaitlynn Thayer, Sales Director, Qualigence International

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“What would the key takeaway be from you for other marketing leaders listening? What key advice should they take away from this?

I think a couple of things: One, you're a service-oriented individual, your focus needs to be the audiences that you serve. That's number one.

Number two, you have to have incredibly large ears. First to listen and to ask questions second and constantly ask questions.

I remember a time working at Intuit a little over a decade ago. And the CMO said we don't live in a who, what, where, when, why organizational culture.

It's a why, why, why, why, why, why? And then you can get to the other words. It's always asking why this, why that, and constantly probing and poking.”

- Ty Levine, VP of Marketing, Suplari

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“Every time I've hired a salesperson, I told them roughly the same thing the first meeting is that, your job is to represent the customer in this building.

You need to fight for that customer. What I mean by that is that customer has to trust that you're doing that.

Our industry isn't a turn-and-burn industry. We're going to deal with people 10, 20, 30 years at times. I've had 30-year customers.

So know going into it that this isn't, I may not optimize this one transaction.

But over a lifetime, this is going to be a very loyal customer.

So showing grace when they need it certainly, and when I have my sales guys come in and argue with me, or try to represent their customer with me, then they're doing their job as a salesman.

I can communicate that to their customer saying “Hey, your guy’s fighting for you” instead of trying to screw you per se, he's actually representing you in this building.

Once you take that posture, then you're doing what's right for the customer and that's, what's great for the business because then we can grow.

That posture has been really helpful for us to build that lifelong customer.”

- Doug Evans, VP of Sales North America, SDS2

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“One of our clients had a setback. It was a problematic setback. A reporter called me. They had reached out to the client. The client was busy dealing with the setback.

They were on deadline. Deadlines are very tight, as we know with the postings and the e-newsletters. 

So I reached out to the client. I really insisted and got some information for the reporter. I sent the reporting information. 

It wasn't all positive, but it was what happened factually, what the client was doing to address it. As a result, the story wasn't positive, but it was a lot less negative than it could be. 

As we all know, a lot of times our best stories aren't what appear in the media, but what doesn't appear in the media. 

As a result of that interaction, the reporter viewed me as a trusted source to whom he now goes frequently for evergreen stories. 

As opposed to hiding or not being responsive to the media, that's a kind of thing that can make a difference.

As a result, I can help other clients get positive stories because of that relationship that they probably won't be able to pitch as effectively themselves.”

- Laura Eppler, Chief Marketing Officer,  Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern PA

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“What we do is run a series of experiments. It all comes down to: 

Do you know who the audience is and where you can find them? What offer are you presenting to them and how are you presenting it? What channel are you presenting it through? 

You have to figure out how you can make all of those things work.

It's a series of experiments. I'll give you a great example. One morning I woke up and we had dozens of sales appointments booked, starting at 4:00 AM, overnight. 

I thought, oh great, our website has been hacked. Because this makes no sense. 

I started looking into those appointments. And I realized, no, there's nothing obviously hacked here. These look like legitimate appointments. 

It was a Saturday morning, but I called my colleague and left her a message. “As soon as you get up, we need to sort this out.” So when she got up, she started calling some of these people and we learned that some micro-influencer had posted somewhere that we give away free websites — which is not true.  

By the time I turned off that form at noon, we had 150 sales appointments booked. Between 4:00 AM and noon!

We were scrambling like crazy to talk to these people. We ended up taking a lot of those sales calls. None of them ended up becoming customers. 

We said, okay, wrong audience. 

But very interesting offer. Apparently, a free website is going to get you a lot of sales calls right away. Obviously, we can't do free websites forever, but it really gets you thinking, how can free be used as a marketing incentive or a way to get people in the door? 

And then in terms of channel: micro-influencers.

It's a process of learning, figuring out what works, what doesn't work, taking the things that do work (in this case, the idea of free) and see if there's anything you can do to build on that.”

- Dawn Verbrigghe, CEO of Jottful

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“Never in my life have I ever heard anybody in a boardroom or in a locker room say we have too many good leaders. There's not just one. 

You don't have to be a leader just because you're a quarterback. 

There's guys that are leaders in the wide receiver room, just like there's leaders that are in the ops department that may not have a title of executive vice president or chief operating officer or anything like that.

Leadership is a skill that is needed in all facets of organizations and the best teams that I've been around both athletically and in business have had different layers of them. 

They've always constantly tried to develop those skills because, you're either getting better or you're getting worse.

The same holds true in business and in those organizations that get it that understand that it's not just hey, we had a good month or, hey, we had a good five years. 

They're always constantly trying to get better. And that's just one component.

There's all different components of business. 

Leadership is just one component of it, but I think it's really the gas that makes the car go.”

- Tyler Palko, Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Solutions 21

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"Be real and human. We all want to be perfect and not make a mistake and not drop the ball. We work very hard to provide excellent service to our customers, but things will invariably go wrong. 

So when they do how you handle that will really make or break how long you have this relationship with the customer. 

So if you say, listen, I'm sorry, I screwed up, let's try to figure out what happened and then let's build off that so this won't happen again. 

If we can be honest and transparent about those things, that really builds a lot of equity with that customer, with that person. 

They learn to trust you because you've been real. Things happen. We try to set forth as to have perfect implementations and migrations, but sometimes something happens. 

And so when that does it's, if we're real about it and trust me, we don't like to make mistakes, so it bothers us when we do so if we don't delight a customer, if we own up to it, I think that helps. 

It's not about you, it's about your customer."

- Carrie Borchers, Regional VP of Sales, US Signal

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