I received a text message from a long-time client late last night letting me know that he wasn’t happy with us. I didn’t know what that meant but I replied and let him know that I’d be open to speaking with him anytime. We ended up having a conversation the following afternoon. Instead of telling me that something was broken, he let me know that he didn’t feel like we were taking into account his overall relationship with us when he needed service or sales. He recounted to me that we had his personal residence and one of his companies, while his son and daughter are also customers. He explained he doesn’t necessarily feel like a number, but he feels like he’s not getting top service. I apologized and offered to come over to the house and do a walk-through with them to make sure that he and his wife got back to a happy place.
My late-night nasty gram got me thinking about a bigger issue. How on earth do we operationalize a program designed to identify and cater to a VIP customer segment? What are the requirements for something like that? I can understand an organization where the owner is the center of the universe (a business model one of my mentors calls “Santa and his elves”) — that’s easy. How do you scale that beyond a selling owner?
Also by Henry Clifford: Using the Three Cs to Grow Your Relationships
In a bid to help fast-forward this inside your business, here are some thoughts that I’ve been considering, and that we’ll be implementing at Livewire, aimed at helping us identify and engage VIP clients:
- Analyzing Total Spend: We’ll flag customers with lifetime spend over $50k as VIPs, automatically assigning them a single point of contact (in this case, our service manager) who is responsible for scheduling an annual health check. The sales rep will be copied on any of these service department communications to intercede as common sense dictates. There’s a gap here. Salespeople are horrible at rhythmic check-ins and service personnel have a hard time stepping back and understanding when an upgrade is a better fit over a fix. This is where the “common sense” part comes in and we’ll have to keep a close eye on this.
- Multiple Locations: There’s nothing more maddening for clients than when we fail to understand the common thread across their homes and businesses. The relationship manager approach will hopefully go a long way to humanizing these interactions and helping clients “feel the love.”
- Promote It: We’re going to turn up the volume on how we talk about life after the sale. Our current narrative talks a lot about 24/7 remote support with Parasol, but we have a ton of opportunity to talk about the annual check-ins and the relationship manager dynamic. I’m envisioning this becoming a unique selling point that could help us close more business.
- Benchmark The Best: We plan on modeling our VIP program after private banking and other concierge-style relationships in the spirit of not reinventing the wheel. We’re all in the same business to ensure people stay happy.
Do you have a program like this? If not, how do you cater to those folks? Do you just wait for them to call up and express their frustration; or worse, just not hire you to do the next thing?
Also by Henry Clifford: Breaking Down Your Sales Process
What are you doing in your business to be a better vendor partner to your VIPs? If you’re not, rest assured, your competitors are.
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
