Do I have to like my customers?

The short answer is, no. However, my experience suggests the better you get along with your customers, the more meaningful the relationship becomes. One thing is for sure, if you don’t like your customers, you must at the very least share a likeness with them. And the best form of likeness is: their best interests.
“I don’t really like you, but I still really care about you”, is a powerful mantra I embed into service-based businesses. Even if you don’t like some of your customers ? you still better service the pants off them, and enjoy doing so. Is that ‘idealistic’? You bet! But in today’s hyper-competitive market, anything less is settling for mediocrity and we all know how that story ends.

Without some sort of commonality human relationships are merely surface level, “Eh… take ’em or leave ’em” and “easy come, easy go” ? you know how it goes. These types of relationships hold little intrinsic value to either party, making them transactional at best.

I am staggered by the amount of companies that take an ‘easy come easy go’ approach to customer development. It’s as if they believe there is a never-ending pipe of happy customers lined-up with their eyes shut and wallets open. I’m also not surprised by their limited success.

“Customers want meaning; give them that and you will have them for life.”

I make a living by helping companies get the most out of their sales activities and customer relationships, so in my world, ‘sales’ and ‘service’ go hand in hand. Yet so many companies fail to understand this. They try hard to win new-business, and sometimes do, but then someone along the service chain lets the customer down, in a small or significant way, leaving the self-respecting customer with little choice but to move on. And in the process taking their valuable repeat business and friends with them!

I recently had an experience with a real-estate agent in Melbourne. Initially my experience with this company via the salesperson was great. It’s safe to say if I were to sell a property in this area, this company would have been top of mind.

However, I later dealt with the property manager at this company and my experience with her was nothing short of horrendous. She had zero customer service skills and tried her best to bully me by using legal jargon in the hope I wouldn’t call her bluff. Well I did call her bluff and she eventually backed down, but not before my perception of this company was completely annihilated.

A week or so after this incident a salesperson from this same company then called me to explore my interest in buying a property they had listed. You can guess my response, and yes it may have contained the F-bomb! I’ve also told all my close friends about this real estate company, so my negative experience has multiplied exponentially.

Does the self-focused property manager care about all this? Clearly not. Does she care about empowering her company and sales team? Absolutely not!
The property manager didn’t like me, I could tell from her tone in our first conversation she considered me a problem, or a waste of her precious time. I appreciate property managers are busy and many under-valued, but I don’t care about that because I’m the client and I’m paying! And I am just like every other customer on the planet when it comes to this philosophy. So it’s worth understanding.

The property manager didn’t have to like me, but she could have at least shared a likeness with me. This creates meaning with anyone you deal with, not only customers and it’s the most powerful (zero cost) strategy that I know of to build valuable long lasting customer relationships.

For more Selling Strategies advice, click here.

Trent Leyshan is the founder and CEO of BOOM Sales! a leading sales training and sales development specialist. He is also the creator of The NAKED Salesman, BOOMOLOGY! RetroService, and the Empathy Selling Process.