How Hard Does Building Loyalty Have to Be?

Good sales training can teach you how to make more sales. Great sales training teaches you how to create more custom

Good sales training can teach you how to make more sales. Great sales training teaches you how to create more customers who are fiercely loyal to you and your company.

The same principle applies to training that teaches any customer-contact people—service reps, technicians, marketers—how to communicate with customers in a way that builds stronger relationships.

Whether the issue is sales or customer communications, genuinely great training should produce lasting loyalty gains over a long period of time. Customer loyalty should just keep on growing—a snowball effect. For that to happen, the training somehow has to enable ordinary employees to become extraordinary. And for that to happen, the training has to impart knowledge and skills that can be used every day by average people in the real world.

If training is going to impart such skills, the sales and/or communication system being taught must be, a) easy to learn and, b) practical and flexible enough to use on the job every day.

With all due modesty, I happen to know of a great sales system that also works as a great customer-communication system. It is practical, flexible, and easy to learn. That very point is made in a LinkedIn message I received recently from Justin Kurtz, an interactive print consultant at Mines and Pines, a publishing company in Grand Rapids, Minn. “I want to share with you just how wonderful Action Selling ® is,” Kurtz writes. “I live by the steps every day. I have been the top performer at every business I’ve worked at because of Action Selling ®. If only other people could realize how easy it is! Thank you.”

ALL IT TAKES IS A FEW GREAT SKILLS.

One reason why Action Selling ® is so easy to grasp, learn, and apply is because the training does not waste time and energy trying to teach dozens of skills or loads of forgettable information. Instead it focuses on Five Critical Skills that research has shown to be the biggest contributors to sales success. Those skills are practical and flexible enough to apply every day, with any customer.

All five skills (such as Asking the Best Questions and setting Commitment Objectives) ultimately aim at building stronger relationships and earning loyalty from customers. All five are useful not only for salespeople on formal sales calls but in any customer-contact situation. With a few minor changes in terminology and emphasis, the expertly designed training programs that teach Action Selling ® to salespeople in an easy-to-learn way can serve equally well to turn any customer-contact people into Customer Relationship Professionals (CRPs).

Our new program, Customer Relationship Professional, has been created to do exactly that. What do CRPs do that ordinary customer-contact people don’t? They generate loyalty. In every customer interaction. Every day.

How can Action Selling ® merge selling skills with customer-relationship skills in a useful, productive, and “everyday” way? Because it is based on the best-documented sales-and-communication process in the training industry. The system corresponds to a proven decision-making process that every customer follows. Action Selling ® teaches skills that really work in the real world. Therefore, people who learn it actually practice it. Every day.

What happens when you practice something every day? It gets easy.

For information about how to make employee training pay huge dividends, contact The Sales Board/Action Selling ® at (800) 232-3485.

Want your company to start creating customers who are genuinely loyal? Check out my latest book, Masters of Loyalty: How to Turn Your Work Force Into a Loyalty Force.

ers who are fiercely loyal to you and your company.

The same principle applies to training that teaches any customer-contact people—service reps, technicians, marketers—how to communicate with customers in a way that builds stronger relationships.

Whether the issue is sales or customer communications, genuinely great training should produce lasting loyalty gains over a long period of time. Customer loyalty should just keep on growing—a snowball effect. For that to happen, the training somehow has to enable ordinary employees to become extraordinary. And for that to happen, the training has to impart knowledge and skills that can be used every day by average people in the real world.

If training is going to impart such skills, the sales and/or communication system being taught must be, a) easy to learn and, b) practical and flexible enough to use on the job every day.

With all due modesty, I happen to know of a great sales system that also works as a great customer-communication system. It is practical, flexible, and easy to learn. That very point is made in a LinkedIn message I received recently from Justin Kurtz, an interactive print consultant at Mines and Pines, a publishing company in Grand Rapids, Minn. “I want to share with you just how wonderful Action Selling ® is,” Kurtz writes. “I live by the steps every day. I have been the top performer at every business I’ve worked at because of Action Selling ®. If only other people could realize how easy it is! Thank you.”