Francis Egbuson

We know that loyal customers will refer you to their friends and colleagues and this was the case with the experience I had with a local oil company. We were referred to this company to by a partner company, NFT Consult. As soon as I met the then Head of Human Resources, her comment was clear and re-assuring ‘since you were referred by NFT Consult (the regional Human Resource (HR) company), we believe you can do the job’. And that was it. NFT Consult had made this local oil company a loyal customer and it showed in value placed on the referral. No lengthy discussions about ‘have you done this before’ or ‘have you worked in our industry before’ or ‘we have two proposals, we need a third one’, etc. We are told by the folks from Franklin Covey Customer loyalty practice, that loyal customers will do four things consistently. First, they purchase more in each visit, second, loyal customers come back and purchase more often, third, they refer you to their friends and lastly loyal custom...

Mid way through a 3 day sales performance workshop I facilitated in Kigali, Rwanda recently, a participant asked if ‘going door to door’ for the business to business sales team was a viable practice. Not really, was the immediate response, we can go door to door to sell sim cards and airtime but not so for clients who are trying to improve productivity and generate great return on their technology infrastructure. You don’t need a relationship with a customer to buy airtime on the street but you need one to deliver business solutions on a consistent basis. One is an event and the other is a relationship, especially when done well. And that is what we learn from the yearly Sales Best Practices Survey conducted by Miller Heiman International – now MHI Global. In the introduction to the results from the 2014 survey, we are reminded that like any sport, sales has rules. Rules for the sales leader are the expense plan; headcount. Rules for the salesperson are their comp plan. It spe...

  'Our people don't know how to sell' is a common refrain that we run into in our work with clients from Telecommunications to Banks. There is this idea that sales people are 'born', some kind of genetic dispensation to creating leads and closing sales. And where companies feel they are not blessed with enough of the grafting, they resort to all manner of schemes to 'convince' the customer and ultimately achieve sales targets.  Sounds good, not until you begin to peel the onion. Row Moriaty in a 1995 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article which focused on variability in productivity as a function of job complexity and identified Sales as almost infinite variability. The point was that the fewer decisions a sales person had to make (about activities, offerings, target markets, value propositions, etc) the greater their productivity. So true.   So rather than 'our people don't know how to sell', it is real issue for the productivity of the...

One of the most satisfying aspects of our work is the privilege to meet clients - it is truly an exciting opportunity to listen and work with the client to achieve their business objectives. Usually, we will run into clients 'know what they want' or others who will rely on our experience in the diagnostic process to get a solid understanding of the problem. And this can take a number of iterations to get to the issues, evidence that these issues exist, the impact of these issues on the business and the type of solution we can customize. Now nothing could have prepared us for last week, when we ran into a client who was 'surprised' at the suggestion that the issues the sales team was facing could not be dealt with in isolation of how the sales team was been led. 'we don't do the work, our sales people do' was the emphatic conclusion of the sales leaders at the meeting. Implication is 'fix' our people and we will be fine. Specifically, the sales lea...

During our staff meeting yesterday, our internal business partner made two suggestions for increasing the number of call outs to clients. Call outs are a way of contacting clients to set-up appointments for our Client partners - people who are the key sales and account management folks. One suggestion was that the head of the business should make certain calls if we wanted to increase the likelihood of getting the appointments - these will be calls to Heads of business and other executives. And the second was that we should get the local newspaper business directory. The idea of the local newspaper business directory is a great one because it will have a considerable listing of all businesses in Uganda. But it was the reason that we did not have it at that time that stunned me. We had been waiting for our accountant to buy it. I later learnt that the initial idea for the purchase of the business directory was discussed over three weeks ago. And here is the sad part, our ...