Be ready to learn
When Toombs heads out to meet with a customer, he doesn’t want to just sit in his counterpart’s corner office and exchange platitudes. He wants to make it an effective use of time to learn more about what his customers need.
“I insist he bring his troops in and it’s not just the two of us glossing it over from our helicopters,” Toombs says. “We try to get the guys involved who actually use the products.”
Make sure both you and the people you are bringing into the conversation are ready for a constructive conversation by doing your research beforehand.
“If it’s an active customer and we have a pretty good software program, we know a lot about that customer, maybe more than they know we know,” Toombs says. “I go through all of that and I go through our history and try to analyze what problems they have had relative to what we do for them. So when I walk in the door, I’m prepared at least for what most of the issues would be.”
The catch, of course, is no matter how much research and planning you and your team do, there’s a very good chance the conversation will still hit upon a topic you weren’t prepared to discuss.
“You always get surprised,” Toombs says. “There may be something we didn’t even realize we were doing, and because we have a good relationship, we can fix it. If I have the answer when that objective comes up, and I never bluff in those cases because I’ve been caught bluffing and that’s not a good thing to do. But if I have the answer, I’ll answer it, and if I can’t answer it, I will tell them I can’t answer it. But I make it a point, within at most 48 hours, I get back to them with an answer.”
The key is to approach these meetings with a sense of curiosity and to encourage your employees to do the same. Don’t let not knowing an answer stop you from getting beyond the 10,000-foot conversation.
“It’s amazing when you’re honest and you say, ‘I don’t know, but I
’ll get back to you’ — people like that,” Toombs says. “I don’t care how good you are at your business, and I think I’m pretty good at my business, you’re not going to know every little facet. That’s impossible.”
Your customers can accept that you don’t know everything. In most cases, they just appreciate your concern.
“I don’t care what business you are in today, particularly in this recession, people like to be acknowledged,” Toombs says. “Not just by e-mail, but they like to see people.”
