Be a Winner, Not a Whiner!
While we are building our relationship with our customers’ we will lose some orders to our competition. There is a right way and a wrong way to handle the loss of an order.
If we begin to whine and complain when we lose an order we send the message to our customer, “When you buy from me I care about you, when you don’t, I don’t.” This is not the attitude of a partner. If we make our customers feel poorly when they buy from someone else, they will stop sharing information with us. They know we want their business, we don’t need to punish them for not buying from us.
Child psychologists tell us that if we tear our children apart and overreact every time they do something inappropriate, they will hide things from us and lie to us. The same is true of our customers.
We need to continue to track our customers’ purchases. We need to know what they bought, how much they bought, how much they paid, and when it is going to ship. This is how we build the relationship and get to know their buying patterns. This will enable us to sell them more in the future. We don’t need to win all the battles, just the war!
When playing poker, it’s not a question of how many hands a player wins, but which hands he wins and maximizing them when he does. The same can be said of selling. You are going to miss some orders, but if you whine and complain you will cease to learn about your customer and the market. More importantly, you will send a terrible message to your customer!
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