Customer relations are a wonderful thing. Done right you build a strong connection with your customers and you can become their preferred supplier of solutions to a particular problem. The new CRM software boom is giving us tools that make this process easier and much more effective. More and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon and the mating call "Let’s get CRM software" is echoing through the Business Jungle.

Just like so many other powerful tools, most end up using only a fraction of the available functions, and instead of evolving their approach and actually improve their relationships, they keep doing the same thing they have always done. Effectively turning what could be a great strength into a nuisance for the customer.

I keep hearing sales managers ranting "It’s been 32 days since we called, we have to call this customer now." This is the first mistake. It doesn’t matter how long ago it was that you called them. There are way too many other facts that come into play to just rely on this one number that CRM can track for you. If this is the common statement at your company, it’s a dead giveaway that you are doing something wrong.

It is however a great way for bad sales managers to look like they are doing something.

Customer relations like any other relation means that you need to pay attention to the customer and if possible try to predict their needs. It does NOT mean that you should be more diligent at bothering them.

The real way to build customer relations is to use every piece of available knowledge about them to become an asset, something that increases their productivity and makes their life just a little better. This is done by listening to what they say, paying attention to what they do, and then contacting them when the time is right. Or if you can’t predict their patterns, at least make their ordering process as smooth and painless as possible. Most services are needed when they are needed, which doesn’t necessarily mean on a fixed schedule.

At a small company I once worked for I was responsible for all purchases. The coffee usage at this place followed patterns that only a chaos mathematician could predict. So we simply ordered when someone noticed that we were getting low. I kept getting calls from the coffee supplier on a certain date every month. It didn’t matter if I ordered a week before or not, on the first Wednesday of every month I got a call telling me to order more coffee.
Not asking… telling! (but we’ll get to that one in another post… )

These calls not only did nothing to help me, they became annoying. They had entered my order frequency at once per month and picked the day to call. Come hell or high water they were going to call me on that day. The fact that I had to tell the sales-people that I just ordered coffee from them told me that they were not the sharpest knives in the drawer.

It would have taken little or no energy for them to start running my orders through the same system and seeing that I recently ordered, maybe over time they would have figured out what I never could; How to predict our coffee consumption. Had they managed to do something like that, they would now have become an asset, helping me make sure that coffee didn’t run out. This would have given them the competitive edge where a competitor would have to work very hard to even be considered.

Needless to say, I had no problems switching coffee suppliers when I saw a good deal simply because I got nothing more than coffee from the old company. Not only did the new supplier beat their price, but I had everything to gain in terms of service.

Real Customer Relations means that you listen, learn, and do everything you can to become an unobtrusive and natural part of your customers life. When your services are self-evident and automatically included in their day to day lives, I guarantee you that you will keep them as customers for a very long time.

By all means, use the tools available to you, but use them to become better at helping your customers. If all you do is use your CRM software to become the Swiss Watch of annoying sales calls, you could probably spend the time, money and energy better somewhere else.