I couldn’t resist the salacious title, but before your mind wanders too far, these three do go brilliantly together, and not just in the libidinal sense.  If you’re one of our customers or you’ve read some of my prior posts, you know that I’m almost never afraid to open the kimono – an open, frank relationship with a prospect or a customer is always better in the long run than the alternative.  You’ll also note that I’ve written primarily in this blog about selling, but in this post I want to talk about serving – specifically serving new customers.  I’m not sure where I first heard the saying that true selling starts after the contract is signed, and I don’t know that I fully agree with it, but I do believe that the initial honeymoon period with a new customer is absolutely critical.  It provides a firm first impression for the customer that either paves the road forward for a great relationship or ensures that there will be bumps ahead.

One of the very many benefits to starting a company is that sooner or later you get to experience in direct, concentrated form, all of the issues big businesses face regularly but sometimes lose in the numbers.  One of these that we’ve been thinking a lot about recently is how effectively we serve our newest customers, and how this impacts our long term relationships with them.  For many of our customers I believe that we’ve done a truly outstanding job of supporting them in their transition to our services in a well designed, well ordered process.  More importantly, our people recognized early on that each new customer was a precious opportunity.  They (I can’t take credit for it) chose, even before we started working on more formal on-boarding processes, to serve each new customer to the fullest extent of their time and talent.  The result is astonishing.  We have customers who truly, in every sense of the word, treat us like partners.  They appreciate us, and more importantly, they trust us.  We proved our worth in the early days through service, and the long term dividends are priceless.

Then we started growing fast, and for a couple customers, we made some very early rookie mistakes in their first weeks as a customer.  The result – everything we’ve done since has been viewed with some skepticism by these customers.  We dug ourselves a hole right out of the gate, and we’ve been climbing out of these holes ever since.  We’ve learned from these mistakes and added processes and controls to prevent them from happening again, but we’ve also learned how critical the honeymoon phase is with each new customer.  The basic gist of what we’ve learned is this:

1.       First impressions with new customers may last the length of our relationship;

2.       We have a short, initial period with each new customer to gain their trust and respect;

3.       We open the kimono – we clearly and openly explain to each new customer the steps we’ll go through to migrate them to COBRApoint, and we don’t sugar coat the effort which will be involved;

4.       We ensure that each of us who touches a new customer relationship understands how import it is that we approach each new customer relationship with an attitude of service.