There’s a hitch about high-level customer policies that goes just beyond me. When a product is placed on the market, companies perform strategic analysis of key market factors and delve in a delicate process of testing customer expectations. Still, they often seem to lose tact in the moment of delivering thanks. It’s somehow believed that saying “Thank you for your business” is bush league and has no place in a professional sales process. Is it really so?
Back in the 1980, the sales value proposition was constructed upon the idea that customers buy your solutions because to do so makes good business sense for their organizations. In this company-centric approach, personal relationship only played a vague part in the pre-buying approach. They helped shaping customer personas, but this was about all – no trace of “emotionality” throughout the rest of the buying cycle.
I still encounter a lot of 80’s-style salespersons. They are those people who feel diminished by saying “Thank you as well” when closing a successful transaction. It seems like they don’t want customers to come out of their door with a sense of replenishment and gratitude for human interaction, but running like from a smug kick in the back.
After all, why would you want to thank back as a business? Even when you have a 6 or 8 figures transaction to celebrate, it’s just the merit of your salespeople who have done their training well and applied their knowledge by finishing off another customer. You don’t want to seed a doubt in the client’s mind over her decision by saying “Thank you” right when you hand the receipt for such a big order, right? Cease communication, manipulate her to pay and then serve as much self-advertising as possible to reinforce your image.
Just one more adage from the 1980s: be severe and authoritative. The message to deliver along with the order confirmation should be something like: “We already know which your expectations are, no need to ask you on that. We are such a competitive team that has served X thousand customers, how can you ever be unhappy?”
Now let’s close the brackets of irony.
Obviously, there is a huge need to “humanize” the entire customer approach. The sales cycle is far from ended when you are handed the receipt of a PO, but it’s the start of a possible long-term collaboration. Old school managers would reinforce their intransigency this moment, to stand their ground on hold for future sales. What today’s marketers find more important in the post-buying stages, though, is nurturing positive WOM and customer loyalty. And saying “thank you” in various degrees of formality plays a huge part here.
In his great book “The Thank You Economy”, Gary Vaynerchuk advises businesses to return to the values of past generations and re-learn how to show courtesy towards customers, through a natural level of personal involvement.
I argue that a well expressed “thank you” even lowers that critical mass of suspicion people usually enter a transaction with. It’s really not a secret businesses are drove by profit and appreciate every transaction, isn’t it?
Saying “thank you” is perfectly scalable for any business, big or small. For value-based leadership, courtesy towards employees, partners and customers is a vital path to success and can generate ROI by growing customer evangelism.
For the sake of your own profit, don’t let time pass. Thank customers right after they pay for your services. It makes a good business practice to send thank you cards and messages to buyers along with a point/counterpoint table with their key pre-buying issues and how company’s solutions address them, to do right self-advertising too. And don’t forget about the fashioned greeting cards on occasions – just to keep the magic alive.
