photo credit: Rich Anderson

Have you ever had a sale that just went bad? These are usually horrendous moments that leave you in a state of shock. You really do always try your best for each customer. Sometimes, though, you just mess up, or some part of your process is off. In some cases, its not your fault at all, but it is always your problem.

There are any number of things that can go wrong with a sale. Perhaps the customer expectations were out of whack. Product quality could be the cause. Sometimes, you just screw up and don’t deliver on all of your promises. And yes, once in awhile, you get “THAT customer.”

Misplaced Expectations

Expectations between customer and vendor are very often out of whack. Usually, there is enough grace to compensate for this. Once in awhile, though, things get so off center that it becomes a very real problem.

When the customer expects one thing, but gets something else entirely, he can become very unhappy with you. The first thing you need to do, in any situation where the customer is unhappy, is to appease. See if you can’t make it right. Hopefully you can.

Whether or not you can make it right, you need to evaluate what went wrong in the first place. If expectations where not in line, then it is usually a communication error. Look through your marketing material, talk to your sales person, and look at your notes. Are you bringing a consistent message to each customer? Sometimes the customer mishears things or misinterprets. But the blame for misplaced expectations can usually be placed squarely on your shoulders.

Going forward, you should have a clearer message and consistent training on that message. You should also have standards and procedures for everyone in your business to follow. One of these procedures should be to have a comprehensive and clear contract that lays out all of the expectations for the customer. This will not solve all problems, but it will sure help in lining up your customers expectations with what you actually plan to deliver.

Oh, and if the expectation was not met simply because you failed to deliver on your promises, you need to fix that pronto!

Product Quality

What happens when you deliver a sub-par product? Well, if you do it consistently, you will soon be out of business. But it can happen to anyone, especially if you source your product from a vendor. Lets say that you wholesale colorful socks to small retail stores. You get a bad shipment, but don’t notice. When you sell those socks to your customer, you can be sure that they notice. They call and tell you that your socks have holes in them.

Your response on bad product is very telling. First of all, it doesn’t matter if you think it was your fault, because it is your fault. You are the one who needs to fix it right away with your customers. Don’t wait for your vendor to do something, you can worry about that later. Never pass the blame.

Once you fix the immediate problem, you need to figure out why it occurred and what to do to make sure it never occurs again. Perhaps you need to start checking the product you buy. Maybe you need to have a long talk with your vendor about their quality control. Switching vendors is an option too. Of course, if you make the product yourself, you must go over every part of the process with a fine tooth comb and put procedures and controls in place so that it never happens again.

Forgotten Promises

When you make a promise but don’t keep it, you can expect your customer to get mad. The best way to avoid forgetting anything on a sale is to write it all down in one place, such as a contract. The second thing you can do is to create policies and procedures that have you giving the same service over and over again. They say practice makes perfect.

Take some time to evaluate why you are making extra promises to a customer. Do you feel you need to in order to get the sale? Are you letting the customer bully you around into a half-hearted promise? You need to be the one to decide what you will and will not do. Promises made on the fly are the hardest to keep.

THAT Customer

Okay, so once in awhile you just get stuck with “THAT customer.” These are the complainers, the nit-pickers, the life-suckers. Before we get too excited bashing this type of customer, let me tell you a couple of things. First of all, they are rare. Not every customer complaint you get is from this type of customer. You can’t write off complaints, either, even if they come from a known complainer. Second, you still need to deal with this customer and try to make them happy, at least through the end of the sale. Sometimes, you will actually succeed and turn one of these tough customers into a really good customer. Not usually, but it has been known to happen.

What do you do with the complaints from “THAT customer?” Well, you need to take them with a grain of salt, but still investigate. If they say that someone was rude to them on the phone, talk to that someone. Maybe the person was egged into being rude, but from a business standpoint, there is never any reason to be rude to any customer. This wouldn’t be the time for a reprimand, however. Rather, it will be a good training experience for your employee.

Having a nit-picky customer who is very vocal about all of your faults can be a pain. However, they can be a blessing in disguise, as well. They force you to get all of your ducks in a row and run a professional operation. Unless they just have a grudge against you, you can usually shut these customers up by becoming more professional and handling all of their concerns.

Bad Sales Can Make You Better

Every bad sale is an opportunity to become a better business. When you make a mistake with a customer, you get a black eye in their mind. If you fix the mistake and go out of your way to make it right, that black eye turns into a white hat. Most customers will realize that you are human. If you fix it fast and personally, they will realize that you care.

You need to treat every bad sale as a learning opportunity for you and your employees. Become better. Put things in place to make sure the same mistakes are not repeated over and over again.

It is also very important to accept the blame for the problem. It is never the vendor’s fault or the employee’s fault. It always comes back to you.

With a little effort, you can turn one bad experience into an opportunity to improve. The more you improve, the better you will be!

__

Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp.

photo credit: the_moog

As a small business owner, you are so busy running the business, you just don’t have time for everything.  Here are the top ten things you probably ignore, but shouldn’t.

1. Business Structure

Is your business structured properly?  Should you incorporate or form an LLC?  If you are incorporated, are you running things correctly and taking full advantage of the benefits?  You really should spend some time learning about business structures and how they can benefit your business.  Check out Incorporate & Grow Rich! to learn more.

2. Employee Morale

Don’t just assume everyone is doing alright.  Actively engage with your employees on a regular basis. Your employee might be dealing with a difficult situation at home.  Maybe he is getting bored at work and needs more of a challenge.  Consider taking time out to recognize employees and show them that you appreciate them.

3. Building Appearance

Look at your building through the eyes of a new customer.  Is it appealing?  It doesn’t matter if you never have a customer on premisis, you and your employees have to come to work every day.  A little paint, some plantings, and maybe some office renovation can go a long way towards making work more enjoyable.  Plus, it gives employees the confidence that you are paying attention to the details.  On the other hand, if you let your building decay and fall apart, what are you doing with your business?

4. The Numbers

Okay, I hope this is not you, but a bunch of small business owners don’t really understand the numbers that make their business work (or fail).  You absolutely need to gain a working knowledge of the numbers for your business so you can know where you are at and where you are going.  If you don’t know your gross margin, your net profit, your free cash flow, and more, you do not know your business and cannot make accurate decisions.

5. Employee Suggestions

Ignore these at great peril.  The thing here is that you don’t mean to ignore them, you just don’t have time for other ideas.  You are too busy with other things.  What you need to do is create a process where you can not only hear, but you can act on employee suggestions.  This is not only about keeping employees happy, this is about making your business better.  Do you really think you are the only one with good ideas?  Employees are at their job every day, and they often have insight and ideas that would never occur to you.  Swallow your pride, open your ears, and improve your business through employee suggestions.

6. Your Sales Process/Marketing Material

How did you come by your presentation and our marketing material?  In many cases, these things are thrown together over time, in response to a need.  What you need to do is revisit the sales process, the presentations, the scripts, and all of the marketing materials and find out if there is a solid message across the board.  If you rely on your sales staff to make up their own things, you are asking for trouble. Control your message, hit your customers with the same one at every stop along the way, and embed it into your sales staff and everyone else.  

7. Customers

No one ignores customers, right?  Well, do you have a consistent process for guaging their happiness with your product or service? Do you constantly get referrals and testimonials?  Do you ever just send a note to say hi?  Your customers are a gold mine for a lot of reasons. You can find out where your weaknesses are, as well as your strengths.  You can get new ideas.  You can get a lot more business, through up sells, repeat sales, and virally through referrals and utilizing great testimonials.  If you do nothing else from this list, engage your customer on a much deeper level.  

8. Education/Training

Most larger businesses have active training regimes.  The same is not true of small businesses.  Yet, if you want to stay ahead of the competition and have the best employees around, you need to train.  Training should happen on an ongoing basis.  It can cover anything related to the business. Humans have an amazing aptitude to learn, but many won’t do it on their own.  So do yourself and your company a big favor; train.  This goes for you too. Keep your mind working and always seek out ways to learn more about your craft.  A little education can go a very long way.

9. Fun

You take your work seriously.  That is fine.  Your employees should too.  Still, from time to time, everyone needs to have a little fun. Why not at work?  Have birthday parties, go on outings, have holiday parties, and more.  Beyond that, what fun can you institute into the regular work day?  Sure, it can get out of hand, with employees spending too much time at the dart board (the one with your picture attached to it).  Done right, however, it can make work something everyone looks forward to.  Consider having ongoing games and contests, along with work-related rewards for everyone.  One idea: hide a prize somewhere around the office.  The person who finds it gets to keep it (one great place to hide it is at the bottom of someone’s inbox, especially if they are notorious for not getting through it).

10. Yourself

Many business owners are so busy with everything else, they have no time for themselves.  Don’t let this be you.  Treat yourself with kindness and respect.

–

What about you?  Is there anything you ignore that you need to get better about?  What else could be on this list?  Leave a comment bellow.  

__

Bradford Shimp is a reader, writer, and thinker on business issues.  Follow Bradford on Twitter.  

To further your business education, you should be reading relevant business books.  Check out Books Unwound to learn more about great titles that can really help you in your business.

 Question via Twitter: What are the best ways to launch a small business online with low cost? 

Ask me a question via Twitter – @bradfordshimp

To answer this question, I am going to assume that you either already know what business you are going to launch or are trying to bring your brick and mortar business online.  

The internet has made it possible for anyone to launch a small business.  It has cut start up costs way down, gives access to a much larger pool of customers, and removes many barriers to entry.  Because it is so easy to launch a small business online, there are many people who do it half-heartedly.  They have less invested monetarily, so they don’t invest as much of themselves as they should.  So my first piece of advice is to spend your time, not your money.  

When launching a small business of any kind, be sure that you are following your passion and working your tail off.  Online, there are lots of free and cheap things you can do to build your business.  You should treat each of these things as if they are costing you a great deal of money.  If you are launching an online business, you need to take it seriously.

The one essential thing you need to have in order to make money online is a web prescence.  Traditionally, this is in the form of a web site.  However, there a many other ways you can build a web prescence, including social networks like Twitter and Facebook as well as sites that let you build pages within them, such as Squidoo.  If you are planning to make money through affliate marketing, you can use pre-existing sites or article writing web sites, such as Helium.  However, if you plan to build a business, you are going to want your own home online.  This will come in the form of a website and your own web address.  You can buy a web address for around $10 per year.  When picking your web address, make sure it ends in .com and that it will be easy to remember.  Again, if you are starting a business online, buy your own web address.

Once you have a web address, you need a web site.  The cheapest way to have a web site is to build your own.  But don’t worry, you don’t need to learn alot right away.  I suggest starting a blog at WordPress.com.  A WordPress blog can be customized to become any kind of site you need, including an e-commerce site.  Before you start your business, set up a personal blog at WordPress to get the hang of it.  Once you are ready to start your business, you will need to spend some time tweaking your WordPress blog to make it look, feel, and act how you want it to.  Since you have your own web address, you will want to have it go directly to your WordPress site.  One trick to save money is to have your web address redirect to your free blog hosted on WordPress.  You can do this at the site where you registered your web address.  The problem with this is that at some point you may want to host the blog through a hosting service.  If you decide to do that, you may need to manually transfer all of your site info into a new WordPress blog, which could be very time consuming.  If you think you want to have your web site hosted, I suggest starting that way.  Hosting can be very affordable, anywhere from $4 per month.  It is very easy to set up WordPress on a hosting solution such as Hostmonster.

Having a good web site is like having a storefront.  Now you need traffic.  There a many ways to go about getting traffic.  The good news is that you can spend time rather than money.  I suggest involving yourself in a few social networks.  Before you do, make sure your potentials are already using these networks.  If they are not, then do not bother.  If you have customers in your brick and mortar business, you can just ask around.  If not, get on some social networks and do some exploring.  Also, find blogs and forums that relate to your business and add to the conversation.  It can also be very helpful to start a blog of your own with a focus on building content that will draw the kind of customers that you want.  

As you add to the conversation and provide links back to your site, you will slowly begin to see traffic.  Now it is time to sell.  One great practice is to have a soft sell.  If you can, provide a free piece of information that your targets will want to get their hands on.  Offer it in exchange for a sign up to your newsletter.  This is key.  You need to have a way to get the e-mail address of your site’s visitors.  Building your e-mail list should be the primary focus of the first few months of your online business.  Once you have an e-mail address, you can take your time and really sell to the potential.  This is a benefit that an online business has over most traditional retail businesses.  

Once you build a nice e-mail list and have visitors coming through natural search, social networks, and links, you are well on your way to having a successful online business.  The great news is that it can cost you very little to do all of this, at least in terms of money.  You can realistically accomplish all of the above for $15 per year.  Of course, you will need to invest alot of time into learning the concepts of the web and social marketing.  But once you learn how to build a web prescence and get traffic to it, you will be able to repeat the process again and again.  

If you would like more detailed instructions on any of these steps, please leave a comment or Twitter me @bradfordshimp.

Smart Mouth has a unique hook and value proposition.  Their advertising talks about having 24 hours of fresh breath.  The key element in this is that you will be able to wake up with fresh breath.  In essence, they claim to have solved the problem of morning breath.  

Here is how they do it.  When you buy a package of Smart Mouth, you receive some instructions.  In those instructions, you learn that you are supposed to rinse twice a day.  Once in the morning and once before bed.  Each rinsing will last 12 hours, for 24 hours of fresh breath.  

This is pure genius, if only for its simplicity.  Smart Mouth wanted to give its customers 24 hours of fresh breath.  However, its formula could only give 12 hours.  Their answer, teach the customers to rinse twice a day!  

What is so smart about this is that Smart Mouth doesn’t really provide anything that a product like Listerine doesn’t.  Listerine also gives you 12 hours of fresh breath.  But Smart Mouth saw a way to market itself as 24 hours of fresh breath.  You could do the same thing with Listerine, but I know I never thought to do so.  Smart Mouth educated me.  Interestingly, Listerine is now advertising that you should rinse at night.  They are playing catch up.  

Smart Mouth probably would not succeed as well if it just relied on advertising to get its message of 24 hours of fresh breath out.  Indeed, they create the value proposition in their adversting, and then deliver on it with their packaging.  Smart Mouth has truly uniqe packaging.  It comes in a box with 2 squirt bottles of formula and a 2 teaspoon medicine cup.  The box includes specific and easy to understand directions on how to use the product.  Here is a break down of what is happening with the packaging:

• The box is unique and sets Smart Mouth apart from competitors.
• The 2 squirt bottles seperate the formula and let you mix it right before rinsing.  They claim this helps the formula to be activated right before you rinse, which gives you the sense that you are working with a superior product.  Mentadent does the same thing with toothpaste.  
• The medicine cup for rinsing gives you the feeling that you are using something that is going to make your mouth healthier.  You already have certain associations with that type of cup.  Plus, what other mouth wash gives you a cup to use with their product?  Extra value provided.
• The directions educate you on proper use of the product, while giving gravity to the idea that this product is better and more scientific.

Smart Mouth may not be any better than the competitors.  Yet it is certainly smarter.  Is there really any need to have 2 bottles of formula that you mix right before rinsing your mouth?  Maybe not, but it seems right.  The name itself is stroking your ego when you use it.  If you use Smart Mouth, you are naturally a smarter, pickier, more health conscious consumer.  

All in all, Smart Mouth gets is right on every level, from naming ,to advertising, to execution.  While all of that makes this a truly smart product, here is what is really smart about Smart Mouth:

If they can get you to use their product twice as much, they can sell twice as much product.

Cue Ode to Joy.  

Everything about Smart Mouth, its name, its packaging, its instructions, its value proposition, its all designed to do one thing.  It encourages you to use the product twice as much as you normally would.  And because they do all of those things right, you are happy to comply.  

Now go buy some Smart Mouth and learn from what they do.  What simple things can you do with your product or service that will increase value and get customers clamoring to buy and use more?