RECOGNIZING
late on Friday and made sure her client got taken care of, which saved our company from losing a huge account!” Legitimate recognition tells teammembers that their efforts are rewarded, and it reminds them that they’re not the only ones working hard and doing great things for the company. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with a little friendly competition between teammembers to see who can do the best job! How can you apply this knowledge in your own business?Well, understand that public appreciation for a job well-done Top Performers accomplishments? If not, start with at least one monthly meeting where you designate an employee of the month. Shout out individuals through company emails when they’ve done something special. And keepmixing it up. However you choose to do it, give individual recognition a shot to see what it can do for your team’s productivity andmorale! is truly infectious. Have youmade it a habit to recognize individuals for their
Conventional wisdom suggests that if you reward individual team members for their good work in a business, you’re simply encouraging cutthroat competition, rather than helping the team perform better as a whole. However, recent research has found that individual recognition has an important role to play! According to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, recognizing individual employees for doing a great job boosts the performance of co-workers as well. This experiment had more than 250 students make small boxes on their own. Then, they combine into groups to build the boxes into towers. The researchers praised the top performer in half of the teams, and then they repeated the assignment. In the second round, the teams whose top performers had been praised saw significant improvement in both individual and team tasks. The other teams saw no improvement.
Wooing customers is tricky. They play hard to get, and more often than not, YOU have to go to them. That’s what they expect, whether they realize it or not. Is it sounding like a relationship yet? It should, because in a way, it kind of is. Business is all about relationships and customer loyalty. If you don’t proactively reach out to customers outside their buying cycle, it will be extremely difficult to maintain their loyalty. It’s a difficult thing to do consistently and well, but it can be done. The key is proper account management. Think about the last time you were in the market for a car. Chances are, you went to the dealer with a price in mind, and that’s what you expected to talk to the salesman about. You weren’t planning to discuss what you liked best about individual vehicles or why the purchase was important. You expected to haggle, and if your customers come to you with first contact, that’s what they’ll Why did individual praise help the team? It’s because other team members tend to work hard to emulate the top performers — they’re spurred on by public recognition. When each individual team member’s performance improves, the whole group’s performance does as well. It’s especially pronounced if the person you recognize is acknowledged as valuable by the rest of the team. But don’t start praising individual team members willy-nilly! Keep in mind that any reward system you choose should be applied across the entire company. If some teams feel left out, this can actually be a drag on their performance, and it can also hurt team morale, which is obviously the opposite of what you want. The other key is to have recognition based on merit. Any positive benefits of individual recognition will disappear if it seems like the whole system is rigged, which is why it’s so important to back up your decision with an explanation, such as, “Kaylee stayed
Wooing Your Customers Account Management: The Art Is in the Chase
expect, too. And this interaction will make it difficult for you to add value.
To make price a nonissue, you have to find out what has value to the customer. Research suggests that the majority of a decision to buy is made prior to contacting the seller of an item. If you make first contact, of course, you can negotiate more on your terms and sell to their value, rather than their price ceiling. Again, it’s challenging to track contact, follow-up, and the status of potential and current buyers. The most effective software for this undertaking is Handle, which can automatically remind you to follow up at key points outside of the buying cycle —when customers are thinking about price. It allows you to be proactive instead of reactive. Contact us at 763-548-0828 to learn more! Handle will keep your relationships healthy and strong — your customer relationships, that is.
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