When Did It Become “Hip” to be Helpful?

When did businesses begin to be helpful to their clients and start treating them like the assets they truly are?

I can remember working with a team of Account Representatives a few years ago.

They were each responsible for looking after the needs of a dozen or so clients.

These Account Reps did a great job of making sure that each client knew about the products and services they had to offer, however there was some frustration among the Reps because employee turnover at the clients meant that each Rep would have to begin again to build a relationship of trust with the new employee. The Account Reps felt that turnover stood in the way of making progress at their accounts.

Leveraging Trust and Good Will

As a salesperson or marketer, how do you leverage the trust and good will that it might take years to build when you have no control over employee turnover?

Before the digital age, the Internet, and social media, people were at the mercy of companies to bring news of products and services to them. If you were in the market to buy a new car, let’s say, you’d have to wait for the new car ads to appear in magazines in order to know which new models and features were being offered that year. In other words, you were dependent on the car company to tell you — businesses had the buying public right where they wanted them to be.

Today that’s all changed — now the buying public has all of the information available right at its fingertips. Not only can I research cars, models, and options anytime I want, but I can also solicit reviews from other buyers before I make my choice.

Of course, this is true today not just for car buying, but for practically any product or service that you may be needing.

So let’s go back now to those Account Representatives — what did they need to learn in order to deal with their dilemma, and how do these two examples tie together?

The answer is simple: Be helpful to your clients, and remember that every one of them is an asset of yours.

Management needed to remind its Account Representatives that every conversation, every interaction, every engagement with a client was another opportunity to be helpful to an asset in the field that may very well move to another company at some point in their working career.  These “assets” will, if you treat them well, likely take you to the new company with them when they change jobs. And that is how a good salesperson or marketer leverages good will in the face of an inevitably moving and fluid client base.

Here’s a related article from deep in the archives you might find relevant: Why Aren’t We Getting New Clients?