Customer service is only as good as it is consistent. So everyone needs to buy in. Service must be exceptional across every department, every shift, all day, every day. With every transaction, every customer. There is no point in being excellent 80% of the time – 20% of your customers will not be impressed. Here are a few pointers to get started:

1. Make a personal commitment to excellence and list the benefits. Check through every customer contact point in your company and note current norms, attitudes and behaviours. Where are the gaps, flaws and choke points?
2. Listen to your staff. Listen to your customers. Set new standards in collaboration with staff. Make those standards measurable and tangible
3. Get your team on board. Everyone – not just frontline staff – needs to buy in so that excellence is seamless across the organisation. Get your people trained up, engaged and excited. They need to learn that their efforts and talents will be recognised and reinforced. Everyone matters.
4. Keep measuring. Service is a process so it’s about continuous improvement. Keep listening – use feedback channels. Support the gate keepers (staff) by on- going training and motivation. Reward excellence. Appreciate staff. Praise where due. Celebrate the results.

The trouble with technology (despite its valuable attributes) is that it can very easily fool sales people into thinking they are busy – reading and sending emails, research on the net, voicemail, writing proposals, checking documents, discussing the recession and ‘how bad things are out there’ coffee breaks, copying, printing…it’s all in a day’s work. But it is important to remember that you can be a ‘busy fool’.

As a sales person, your job is to sell. To sell, you must sit eye to eye in front of the customer and listen, talk and close the sale. That’s your job and everything else is secondary and supports that basic function. If you are not talking to customers who will spend with you, you are not a salesperson. An excellent administrator perhaps but that is not your role. Sales people need to prioritise their time ruthlessly, and their priority is to engage with prospects and customers. CCT –or customer contact time should be top of the agenda and you need to measure that. Once CCT increases dramatically, sales revenues will rise accordingly.

It depends on the service/product you are selling, how good a salesperson you are, how good the company you work for is, etc. And the time frame – was he suggesting it would take one year, three years or longer? If we say we want to double our sales in a year, the short answer is, yes, it is possible.

To double your sales what you need to do is double the results you’re getting with your funnel:

• Double your traffic (see 24 instead of 12 customers per week and double your sales) or
• Double your closing strike rate (if you see 12 customer per week and you close 4, aim to close 8) or
• Double your current customers’ annual spend (ask for more business)

At first glance, doubling any of these can seem impossible – but it doesn’t have to be. If you have 100 customers spending €5k p.a. your revenue is €500,000. If you could persuade 50 of those to increase their budget to €8k p.a. ; another 50 to introduce you to one new customer like them; and target just one brand new customer per month who would spend €8k p.a. – you will double your revenue to €1m. Hard work. But infinitely possible. And remember, when you double your revenue you double your value to your company, your confidence also doubles and you are financially in a doubly strong position.