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WE ARE ALL IN THIS: Customer Conversations Really Are for Everyone

SHARON INTRODUCED HERSELF TO ME as our team was setting up for a large training event. In her job, she supported the company's expansive sales and service teams; she had been doing this for nearly two years following her graduation from college. “There are several of us from the support team here. We don't actually talk to customers that much, but our boss thought it would be a good idea for us to hang out here and see what the sales teams are learning to say.”

The training included small-group exercises and some role-play competitions. Over the course of the two days, a funny thing began to happen: the internal teams like Sharon's were adopting and presenting the new messages at least as well as were the sales teams. They got it! During a break on the second day, Sharon came up to me, smiled, and said softly, “I can do this as well as the sales guys!”

There are probably a lot of people around your organization who are like Sharon. They care about what the organization does and what others have to say about it. They might not know everything you do, or consider themselves to be great communicators, or be comfortable in knowing exactly what to say themselves. They might even need a nudge and some encouragement to join in to more customer conversations. But they probably have more inherent abilities than you—or they—realize.

Let's stipulate that company leaders—plus legions of gurus, writers, speakers, and other professional yappers—are prone to saying things like, “Everyone here is in customer service” or “We are all part of the sales team.” Those statements are undoubtedly true, but they also run headfirst into common assumptions and practice. Typically, only a small percentage of people behave as if they are in sales or customer service regardless of where they reside on the organization chart. But there is lots of surprisingly good news, right in front of us, that can help move your teams much closer to that stated ideal. When that happens, growth follows.

EVERYONE IS A SALES REP

How much of your work time involves convincing or persuading people? Is it an hour in your typical workday? More? According to a study commissioned by Daniel Pink and reported in his book To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth about Moving Others, the average full-time American worker spends about 40 percent of his or her time in active persuasion mode. Pink calls this “non-sales selling.” Furthermore, more Americans than you might think are involved in good old-fashioned “sales selling.” Even during the rise of e-commerce since 2000—which has forced waves of disintermediation—the proportion of the U.S. workforce in sales (1 in 9) has stayed the same. A state comprised only of salespeople would be the fifth-most populous state in America!

Nevertheless, all of the platitudes in the world about “We're all selling something” will not sway everyone to embrace the idea. Many are downright uncomfortable with anything smacking of sales. Why? First, sales doesn't exactly have the best reputation as a profession. In national Gallup polling on the trustworthiness of various professions, “car salespeople” are always at or near the bottom (dwelling in the muck near “members of Congress” and “lobbyists”). During the past forty years, the combination of Americans who rate car salespeople “very high” or “high” in trustworthiness has never reached even 10 percent.

Another reason many pull back from the opportunities in non-sales selling is the belief that a distinct personality type (a type we don't think we have ourselves) is best suited for persuasion. Think backslapping, friendly, gregarious, hypersocial extraverts in sport coats. Depending on your age, the first image that comes to mind might resemble the Herb Tarlek character from the 1970s TV sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard car salesman character in the 1996 film Fargo, or the pushy young retail clerk who tried last month to sell you a service contract on a new gizmo. In any case, the image isn't flattering. Forty years after WKRP was airing on network TV—with an assist from syndication—Herb Tarlek remains an iconic symbol of the vacuous salesman in a bad polyester jacket.

Aside from the unprofessional look, the Tarlek-esque package contains a number of behaviors that make customers cringe. Salespeople are often accused of being overly concerned with their sales quota, not really listening to the customer, lacking social boundaries, and failing to ever take no for an answer.

I sometimes think of this prototypical blowhard to be like that person who pulls up next to you at a stoplight, singing loudly to a tune in their vehicle, seemingly oblivious to the world around them. It's amusing to see from afar, but I am also happy that I am not in that vehicle. That guy isn't going to let the environment stop him from enjoying the sound of his own voice.

The stereotype is not fair, of course. My work with dozens of organizations, including thousands of professional salespeople, has exposed me to the harsh reality of selling. It is tough and uncertain work, not for the faint of heart or thin of skin. When you're being told “no” on a regular basis, sent down organizational rat holes, lied to, and sometimes run through the procurement wringer just so that prospect can negotiate better terms from a competing vendor, you need a little bluster just to even things out. Many of us believe it's simply part of the mix when deploying the extraverts who are seemingly superior when it comes to selling. Perhaps the business world needs to change its collective thinking. Even if the entire business world doesn't, you certainly can.

I learned the hard way. While still in my twenties, I went into the small-market radio station business with an MBA classmate. Being inexperienced and naïve, I followed conventional wisdom. We would work the best advertiser accounts ourselves, then find some gregarious young people to work on commission and make a lot of calls to build additional business. After all, if sales success is a function of making more calls and pitching harder than the competition, then we could play that game as well as anyone.

The results were decidedly mixed. We grew the business but at a high cost of time, turnover, and frustration. When I investigated, I learned from our stations' customers (and the prospects we failed to land) that our gregarious young reps were often wearing out the market. They pitched, they pleaded, they persisted—but they didn't slow down long enough to listen. Over time we have learned how much more effective active listening is than incessant pitching. When businesspeople demonstrate active listening (through sensing, evaluating, and responding), they build trust and future business opportunities. My experience is that the business value of listening extends far beyond the sales team alone; it includes everyone with customer contact, including installation, service, delivery, and administrative teams. It also includes everyone else who knows about you and your business.

THIS IS FOR MORE THAN JUST A FEW EMPLOYEES . . . OR EVEN JUST EMPLOYEES

We hear a lot about the need for organizations to “join the social conversation.” That advice is often directed to organizational leaders, pushing them to engage in the ever-growing list of social media channels (and often to hire expert help to avoid messing it up). Communication through social media is definitely important, and increasingly so. Unfortunately, however, in the rush to embrace social media and the online customer experience, some have lost sight of real-time customer interactions (or have put those concerns on the back burner). I find it is time for many to place more priority on the front lines of customer communication and even the so-called “back office” of the organization.

We know from experience—in business and as customers ourselves—what it's like when pitches, presentations, phone calls, retail shopping encounters, service calls, and the like go poorly. Good companies lose reputation, loyalty, and revenue. Because these frontline interactions are so numerous and common, it's also easy to take for granted how vital they are to business growth. As you saw in Chapter 1, some 93 percent of word of mouth happens offline—typically face to face. There's also mounting evidence that the skill with which your colleagues interact with customers during all of those encounters has substantial, measurable impact on the brand.

Think, for example, of the spectrum of encounters that customers have with frontline service employees—ranging from the more routine maintenance calls to bigger service problems. A research group led by Nancy Sirianni tested those scenarios to see what happens when customer conversations are (or are not) consistent with the company's overall brand personality. The research group created audio recordings, purportedly from a call center, involving both routine calls and problems; they manipulated whether the employees' words, tone, and direction were consistent with the companies' overall brand personality.

The results revealed that, when employees' customer interactions were consistent with company positioning, brand strength and consumers' willingness to pay more rose significantly. When the phone-center interactions were inconsistent, those same measures went south. The impact was even stronger for companies and brands that were not very well known. The researchers say the key factor for companies putting this to practical use is whether employees can “internalize elements of the brand positioning.” In other words, do customer-facing employees believe in the company's value proposition, and are they equipped to convey it to customers?

That customer-facing team might not just be the sales team and the call center. One of my clients is an HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) company, with multiple offices across a wide geographic area. They have two sales teams (one for commercial accounts, the other for residences), plus an in-house call center and dispatch team. This is a high-performing company, a leader in market share that generates consistently strong customer satisfaction scores. But they also want to grow faster, especially through new products and services beyond just the traditional air-conditioning units and furnaces.

As a starting point, we examined who was leading most of the customer interactions. We learned that more than 70 percent were from “techs,” the service technicians who go to homes and offices to do the actual maintenance and troubleshooting work. These techs are dedicated, skilled problem solvers who have to deal with generally agitated customers in generally uncomfortable conditions (my “ride-along” experience with one tech included helping him deal with cluttered attic access, barking dogs, and a wasp nest on a 95-degree day). These workers carry the load when it comes to customer experience. They have the opportunity to also head off potential future problems (safety issues, equipment that is likely to fail) as well as to make the customer aware of other products and services. Yet typically these types of frontline employees get ignored internally; they aren't informed about the full range of products and services offered or what customers are buying these days.

Imagine the growth opportunities in a business like this one, if even 10 percent of a frontline employee's customer interactions led to an opportunity to sell other products or services (and my experience is that 10 percent is quite conservative). In this case, the 10 percent applied to 70 percent of all their customer conversations would produce 7 percent revenue growth—just by changing some elements of how techs talk with customers. Where would you get started?

Employees are typically at the core of your set of messengers, but they are far from the only group you can enlist to accelerate your business. My friends who manage nonprofits and professional associations tell me that much of their time and energy is dedicated to volunteers—finding, informing, and motivating them, plus coordinating their activities. These volunteers are often passionate yet distracted, balancing their day jobs and other commitments with the heartfelt desire to help out. Similarly, in the for-profit world companies can count retired employees (alumni), suppliers, distributors, and channel partners, plus other friends in the communities they serve, as potential messengers. People clearly like to talk. Their jobs and professional relationships consume a lot of their time, money, pride, reputation, anxiety, and planning. Why not allow your organization to be part of their natural conversations?

ALMOST EVERYONE HAS MESSENGER POTENTIAL

If some organizations limit the scope of potentially great customer conversations because they think according to narrow job descriptions like “sales,” then others limit themselves with assumptions about the capacity and personality types of their potential messengers. The biggest limiting assumption is that the best potential messengers are necessarily the extroverts on your team.

If there is any long-held core belief system around selling, then it involves the advantages of extraversion; effective salespeople are assumed to be the ones comfortable with cold calls, networking, and basically any opportunity to pitch their wares. This belief has become the basis of a self-sustaining cycle. Extraverts are supposedly better at sales, so companies and managers screen applicants for sales jobs accordingly. Extraverts become the dominant proportion of the candidate pools, so they get hired for sales jobs at higher rates. Sales managers look for additional entry-level people who will fit into the existing culture, and so on.

Then again, if you ask people (in their role as consumers and buyers) about salespeople, you'll most often get that negative reaction reflected over time in those Gallup polls. Salespeople are viewed as arrogant, pushy, untrustworthy, poor listeners concerned only about the sale. That gap—separating business assumptions and consumers' experiences—is as wide as the Grand Canyon. Furthermore, a research team led by Murray R. Barrick did a combined analysis of 35 separate studies of actual salespeople; they found that the statistical relationship (correlation) between extraversion and sales performance was 0.07. That is, for all practical purposes, zero. The upshot is that managers could have been selecting salespeople on the basis of earlobe length rather than personality and done just as well. What gives?

Adam Grant of the Wharton School tested this relationship directly, with a group of actual salespeople. Professor Grant's team measured the personality traits of 340 reps in outbound-call centers, and then recorded their weekly revenue generation over a three-month period. The team also controlled for factors such as the number of hours worked and the number of months on the job. The extraverts did produce a slightly higher hourly revenue than did the introverts, but it wasn't a practical difference. This result alone is a splash of cold water on any Herb Tarlek–inspired assumptions about outgoing salespeople. But what was really interesting were the results from call center reps who were neither pure extraverts nor pure introverts.

As it turns out, the people who are best at sales and persuasion are neither extraverts nor introverts but rather those in the middle of a personality continuum. Academic researchers have given them the name “ambiverts” because (like ambidextrous people who are neither right-nor left-handed) they can glide between extravert and introvert behaviors according to the situation. For their part, introverts are less likely to initiate conversations or want to close deals. Extraverts, on the other hand, can talk too much, listen too little, and contact customers too often (as was the case with my young radio station sales reps). Ambiverts are better able to balance the activities of provocation, inspection, listening, and responding.

There is a bit of a trap to the name, however. Ambidexterity is rare in the general population, but ambiversion is the norm. That is why I call this group the Nimble Majority. You won't find many ambidextrous colleagues around your organization, yet you are very likely surrounded by lots of underutilized members of the Nimble Majority. The natural inclination toward effective customer conversations permeates your organization. Most likely, you are a member of the Nimble Majority yourself.

This line of research confirms my observations of thousands of individuals, and many different types of personalities, represented across functional areas. There are a few unifying characteristics of the people who excel, regardless of exactly where they engage the customer or how much experience they have in doing so.

Think of a champion speed skater. (Even if, like me, you're not a speed skater yourself, then you have likely seen a few minutes of elite speed skating during a Winter Olympics.) Speed skaters have exceptional acceleration, yet also great balance and a smooth side-to-side motion. They are able to start quickly; good timing makes for an explosive, precise push-off. Champion skaters can also turn on a dime and maneuver through a crowd without getting bladed or stepped upon.

Effective customer conversationalists can likewise start quickly, perhaps with an insightful observation or relevant story. They also adopt a balanced back-and-forth rhythm of speaking and listening. They pay attention to cues from the customer and environment; when necessary, they can speed up or slow down in order to avoid a messy pileup. Because members of the Nimble Majority have enough raw attributes to become adept as messengers, your colleagues don't have to train for thousands of hours to be like an Olympic speed skater. Nor need they wear shiny, skin-tight suits. Thank goodness.

This all means that we should consider not one but three segments of people who can, in different ways, carry your customer conversation: extraverts, Nimble Majority, and introverts. People in these three groups all have a role to play, yet they differ markedly in how they engage with the outside world and where their comfort zones lie.

First, let's discuss your more introverted colleagues. In recent years, there has been a growing recognition of the unique strengths introverts bring to business along with a decreasing professional stigma associated with introversion. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Charles Schwab have all become wildly successful in business despite (or maybe in part because of) being introverted. Still, there are a number of misconceptions about introverts: they're uncomfortable in all social settings, they're particularly afraid of speaking in public, and they gain energy from private reflection. None of these has been shown to be true. Introverts often report as much enjoyment from social settings as do extraverts. With practice and a little desensitization, introverts can not only be good public speakers but also embrace the practice. (David Letterman, George Stephanopoulos, and Malcolm Gladwell are also introverts.) The difference for introverts appears to be in sensitivity to stimulation; prolonged social activity simply means they will need adequate opportunities to recharge.

Extraverts won't be recharging as much as re-stoking. They tend to crave stimulating activities that happen to include social interaction. Perhaps that's another reason why extraverts have traditionally been drawn to sales roles, with their boisterous kickoff meetings and high-octane contests. The challenge in equipping extraverts to be more effective in customer conversations is to get them off the adrenaline rush of near-constant pitching and onto a more balanced approach of listening, selling, and serving.

The majority of your colleagues are, well, in the Nimble Majority. They are perfectly suited for excellence in customer conversations, naturally able to adjust their conversational style to the immediate context. Because of this innate skill, they are less likely to be judged as pushy, insensitive, or arrogant. The challenge is that many people, regardless of personality predispositions, fail to realize how well they and others are equipped for the task. They have been held back—or have held themselves back—due to false assumptions. Bosses, you don't even have to buy your teams sport coats.

THE OPPORTUNITY IS EXPONENTIAL

Chances are, your organization has hamstrung itself to some degree over time. Restricted by assumptions regarding extraversion—needlessly, as we now know—companies have limited both the types and numbers of people whom they entrust with customer relationships. That is a waste of human talent and professional opportunity.

This is much bigger than sales, by the way. It applies to everyone who is engaging (or should be engaging) the outside world in ways that can stimulate business growth, build customer loyalty, and fortify customer relationships. It is about the inherent fitness that you and your colleagues have for transforming the hundreds of customer conversations already taking place every day. And it most certainly includes the people who work in the so-called “back office” and don't have regular customer interaction in their formal job descriptions.

Considering the growth of social media and networking, it's more important than ever to leverage all of your colleagues. Everyone has ties to community leaders, friends in complementary businesses, influencers, and/or friends who represent one or more target buyers for your company's offerings. No one has to necessarily be highly visible or a product expert in order to be an effective contributor to customer conversations. There is a role for everyone, whether it be in planning, creating, and/or delivering your messages. To some degree, everyone close to you and your organization is an expert.

Let's do a little math. The median number of Facebook friends is nearly 200. If you add in other social media channels like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest, the number of active connections that everyone (front office and back office included) has gets much higher. Yet that's only part of the conversational opportunity. Consider the everyday “analog” conversations that people have around their neighborhoods, tailgate parties, dinner parties, volunteer events, houses of worship, schools, practices, and the like. That likely translates into hundreds of people and thousands of conversational opportunities in a typical month per person. Depending on what they say (or don't say), those outside of the organization are forming their opinions of what it is like to buy from you, work for you, donate to you, volunteer for you, or engage with you in the community.

There is a place for everyone, whatever their role in the organization or personality type. For example, introverts can be great informants for creating messages and talking points; they will be attuned to customers' concerns and the nuances of different conversational settings. The extraverts will tend to excel at modeling good conversations, doing role-plays, and generally building confidence across the organization. The Nimble Majority types might be best at showing good practices at community events, networking opportunities, and trade shows, where the interplay between assertive statements and empathetic listening is particularly important.

Similarly, you might prioritize according to conversational opportunities. Who has the most frequent customer contact, and at which point(s) in the customer's decision-making processes? What are the conversation points that can best drive the business? Where are conversations not happening, or happening in a less-than-ideal way? You should allocate people and resources (such as training and incentives) to those conversational opportunities where you can gain near-term traction. You might be missing customer-retention goals because the sales and service teams are having very different interactions with customers. You might be able to cross-sell or up-sell more effectively if the account or operations teams who spend the most time with customers knew which questions to ask. You might generate new opportunities if those delivering or installing your stuff were more confident in answering customers' questions.

Remember that everyone has a role. The introverts might not become six-figure speakers like Malcolm Gladwell, but their innate ability to understand context is valuable to everyone. The extraverts might need a little tamping down, yet their drive to engage the world outside of your organization can motivate others. Their energy is contagious. The Nimble Majority should be unleashed. Their natural flexibility when it comes to listening and speaking provides the model for productive customer conversations. Although we can admire the extraverts' damn-the-torpedoes focus, there is something to be said for taking the torpedoes into account.

GOOD CONVERSATIONS HELP EVERYONE

The transformation of customer conversations is no gimmick, and it is more than a short-term campaign designed to boost sales or employee engagement. Rather, it is a way to share your value with more people in an authentic way (because it is delivered by people who know you best, warts and all). That helps everyone.

Let's consider the difference for consumers when other human beings are involved in their buying process. Just to keep it real, I selected an example that involved two studies and thousands of actual purchases of pizza and booze.

A research team led by Avi Goldfarb compared online orders (which customers submitted on their own) to phone orders (which involved talking to someone else) at a pizza chain during a four-year period. The online orders had, on average, 14 percent more special instructions (such as combining or dividing toppings). The online orders also contained about 100 more calories than did the phone orders. The team also studied sales at fourteen liquor stores in Sweden during a multiyear period, after those stores had introduced a self-service option. In this instance they were looking for any differences in purchases of products whose names were difficult to pronounce. The hypothesis was that people who might be interested in those products would have less fear of embarrassment when trying to say the name to another human being. The result? Market share of the products that were hardest to pronounce increased by more than 8 percent when the stores changed to self-service. The conclusion from these two studies was that buyers behave differently when they aren't sure what to do and/or might be embarrassed in the process. That means that the people in your organization can play a role in leading, informing, motivating, reassuring, and otherwise helping customers in making decisions they won't regret.

You and your teams can improve the buying process—and its outcomes—in several ways. First, they can share what similar customers are doing, and why. One of the most powerful forces shaping human behavior is that of social comparison—our innate anxiety about how we compare to relevant others. Arm your teams with information about the products and services that are most popular, along with who is buying. You can also recommend products and services that go together (maybe pairings of pizza and liquor?). One friend who owns a liquor store makes it a point to help his customers match wines and beers for an event to the foods being served—and at times will share ideas for how to serve and store, too. You can inform buyers of the factors that lead to more satisfaction (or, stated differently, less regret) from buyers. For example, if the vast majority of your customers who buy service contracts are satisfied, that's a useful data point. You can also help buyers wade through the many options (often, too many) available in terms of feature sets, ways of paying, and return/exchange policies. Any of these human interventions will help customers and prospects. And they will happen more frequently and consistently when your organization engages and equips more messengers.

The messengers are better off as well. If you're the leader, the process I describe can break down internal barriers and blind spots—between marketing and sales, or headquarters and field offices, or between the front lines and the back office. It also engages and empowers more individuals, bringing them closer to customers and the great results your organization offers.

THE SHARING GENERATION AWAITS YOUR MESSAGE

During my university professor days, educators would get an annual reminder about how the incoming class would not understand our increasingly dated jokes and cultural references. (We used to joke “The students get younger every year.”)

For more than a decade, as fall approaches two faculty members at Beloit College (Ron Neif and Tom McBride) have released the Beloit College Mindset List. It is an unscientific but interesting look at the worldview of incoming college freshmen. They made a number of observations about the Class of 2017 (most of whom were born in or around 1995). During the lifetimes of this new class, spray paint has never legally been sold in Chicago, plasma has never been just a bodily fluid, planes have never landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver, and having a “chat” has seldom involved talking.

This topic is more than an annual conversation starter for teachers, administrators, and parents. Any business that needs to keep its offerings and messages relevant to the next generation must continually adjust its expectations and, ultimately, its marketing approach.

Professors Neif and McBride say this year's group is part of a new and growing “Sharing Generation”—and I tend to agree. They point out a number of ways this manifests itself:

• Sharing information. Theirs is a world that has always been marked by cut-and-paste, forward, post, and retweet. The lines between creation and curation (and even plagiarism) are increasingly blurred.
• Sharing themselves. Whereas previous generations might recoil at instances of Too Much Information, this generation is texting and “chatting” (in a virtual way) almost all the time and often about personal matters. Of course, some are beginning to understand the potential dangers inherent in sexting or inappropriate Facebook posts.
• Sharing transportation. They are tending to flock toward cities and urban centers, have less interest in owning their own vehicles, and are just fine with public transportation.
• Sharing knowledge. This group has been exposed to more collaborative learning methods and prefers them. My experience with corporate training and coaching has been similar; most adults want less of a lecture (the “sage on the stage”) and more of an expert facilitator (the “guide on the side”).
• A shared national identity. They've grown up in a multi-ethnic society where diversity and tolerance have been touted throughout their lifetimes. For most, there are many ways to be “American.” And no, they don't know much about American history.
• Shared spiritual values. This is a generation that often embraces spiritual concepts (meditation, service to others) but not necessarily religious ones. The authors of the Mindset List say today's students are more ecumenical than sectarian. In fact, they assert, this generation may become both the most secular and service-oriented one in American history.

This new mindset, driven by constant connectedness through technology and the erosion of some traditional social structures and norms, has wide implications for all businesses. What is the role of consumer memory when you can look almost anything up? How are community and relationships being reshaped, and will they prove durable for this generation? Marketing messages, networking, and recruiting are continuing to evolve.

Despite the exponential nature of the opportunities in front of them, some organizational leaders get nervous at the prospect of turning their carefully constructed message to (in their view) the masses. They know how, in a digital and viral world, things can go wrong in a hurry if the message is wrong, insensitive, or even just clumsy. In response, they might try to exert an ever-tighter grip on the message and who is allowed to do the talking. So, next we will address the five primary ways that I have seen organizations “mangle” their marketplace messages. These mistakes are often cringe-worthy and costly—but also avoidable. By recognizing the ways that a well-intended message could go awry and adjusting accordingly, leaders can avoid the downside and get to the upside.

Any “Herbs” on your team can come along for the ride, too.