When Sales Go Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Keep Your Delivery Commitment

Have you ever had a buyer situation go wrong? Here's my story when the unexpected and unplanned happened. Read on to discover what I learned and seven ways you can reverse the situation if it happens to you.

My story

Train Table For Kids

I had a up-to-date situation where I wasn't able to meet a commitment to my customers. (And some of you reading this were impacted by the situation. Thank you for your patience with me.)

It wasn't my fault-a delayed plane flight because of weather meant I missed a telephone-based training event that I was paid to deliver. Yet it was my accountability because I agreed to deliver the class and knew that I would be arrival off of a flight 90 minutes before, not leaving a lot of margin for error.

But arrogant belief got the good of me and I didn't make alternate arrangements. And my customers paid the price of my choices because I didn't deliver. Now I get to make it up to them. And I'm going to do that with an narrative on what to do what something goes wrong. Duh!

I want to share with you the seven things to do when you can't keep your commitment to your customer.

But first, a miniature background...

When I ask a group of sales professionals, "What do you think gets a buyer-someone who is in procurement-fired? What is their key doing indicator that if they keep it high, they stay in their job, but if it's low, they get canned?"

Almost every group answers, "Paying too much!"

That's a reasonable talk based on how buyers behave. They all the time act like if you don't give them the best inherent price and undercut the competition that they'll lose their job. Or at least that's what they're taught to say in negotiating classes. If you didn't believe them, you'd never give them a good deal.

Reality is something different. Buyers get fired if they are out of stock or can't get delivery by their internal deadline because if the business doesn't have what it needs to run their business, they're out of business.

According to a discover by Laurence Steinmetz in his book "Selling at Prices Higher Than Your Competitors" (which, notably, costs more than other sales books of the same size), a buyer's greatest fear is non-delivery. Eighty percent of buyers interviewed stated that they choose the seller with the best delivery record.

Think about it this way, a buyer never gets fired for paying too much, because if they did, the most high-priced companies in the world would never get orders. Taking a page from Ibm's sales playbook, "No one has ever been fired for buying Ibm." You can replace Ibm with a wide collection of vendors: Cisco, Hp, Xerox, At&T, and so forth. Rarely are these vendors the cheapest and often they are the most expensive. Yet, they command the lion's share of their market for their areas of expertise. Customers buy from these market-and price-leaders because they deliver!

This means that you have got to deliver when you promise or you lose credibility with your customer, damaging your important relationship.

Your entire sales life, you've heard the phrase, "Under promise and over deliver." I propose that you take it a step further. "Promise what the buyer needs, and over deliver on that." Which brings me to the first point of seven.

1) Make Room

Make sure your delivery promise matches the customer's requirements, with room to adjust it sooner or later if their situation changes. While many customers will do their best to make strict delivery demands, if they've been burned before, they'll wish that you deliver sooner than they really need in response to the sins of other venders (hopefully not in reaction your transgressions.)

Most prudent, experienced customers will consist of a time buffer for important orders. And who could blame them; for example, expectant parents all the time set up the nursery months before the scheduled arrival date, just in case...

There are all the time flat tires, and someone gets sick, and a kid or three needs to go to the doctor. You've got to make room for life to happen. With that in mind, you'll need some buffer.

2) Options?

Brainstorm options to make the delivery schedule. What can you think of that could solve the problem? discover other sources for the goods or service, even if you might have to take a loss on the deal. good to buy from a competitor and keep buyer commitment than spoil your important relationship.

Or maybe you can hijack a demo unit for a concentrate of weeks.

Surely you can shuffle another buyer delivery that has more slack in the schedule.

What if you slipped the delivery for that buyer that just called to say, "Can we push out delivery by a month?" Everybody's happy with this outcome.

3) Alert the Boss

The instant you detect that there might be a delivery problem, let your supervision know. I learned early in my vocation to approach the boss with a list of options and an attitude of, "...and I'm open to other suggestions." (Just a technical note: the word, alternative implies only two choices-that's why they call it alternating current, whether plus or minus. That's why I use the word, options instead of alternative.)

Your employer often has solutions to problems that you haven't yet faced--otherwise they wouldn't be managers (theoretically). They might know an easy fix or have entrance to resources and contacts that you don't (yet).

One of the things I've learned about supervision is that they hate surprises. If you wait until the last minute, they'll have to scramble-reprioritizing elements that you don't know about--and you'll be tagged as a question child (a career-killing label). Give your employer breathing room and they can be their best. And when they're their best, you make more money and get what you want in your career.

4) Communicate!

Communicate with the buyer as soon as you can with your alternatives options. The sooner you let them know, the more breathing room they'll have, and the good it will go for everyone.

(In my case, the occasion my delayed plane hit the ground, I unsuccessfully battled the iPhone browser to entrance my list server to alert my customers. I ended up crashing an airline-club WiFi association to get on-line with my laptop. The alert hit their mailboxes two minutes before show time. I'm not trying to sound heroic, I sure learned from that experience!)

Although you might think it will be painful, I propose the personal touch with a phone call. Most customers will really appreciate that you called to fill them in and in the face of trouble, you'll reinforce your relationship.

An alternative is a well-written e-mail that outlines the situation and your solution. Keep in mind that email counts as a written transportation in many courts of law, so make sure that you write in integrity, knowing that you'll have to deliver on that promise, too. (Note to self: you missed this one, too. The promise for this narrative was Friday, and here it's Thursday! Okay, so I'm still working the bugs out of me.)

5) buyer Comfort

If there are things that you can offer to heighten your customer's situation, find out what the buyer thinks. That could bring them some comfort.

Don't make your buyer wrong and whenever possible, don't make your buyer take the hit. Your buyer will go straight through their emotions fluctuating from disappointment to fear, so even though this is business, be ready for something emotional to show up.

It's all the time wise to have your employer contact the buyer to see if there is something that they can communicate to the customer's boss. Don't contact the customer's boss without their permission! The buyer may have reasons of their own to not let their boss know. Although for us, we know different.

6) Apologize Appropriately

After presenting the explication to your customer's satisfaction, then it's time to apologize for the inconvenience and hassle. Psychologically, until the buyer can be receptive to an apology, saying, "I'm sorry" can cause more harm than good because it may come over as condescending. Until they know that it's going to work out, they will begrudgingly accept your apology because they are still injured. After they see that all is well, they can accept your apology and mean it.

Saying, "I apologize for the inconvenience and heartburn this situation has created" acknowledges the damage done. But that's not enough. The four most suited words that begin to erase the effects of a mistake are, "Will you forgive me?"

The great thing about forgiveness is that once they do, they can't bring it up again. It's really cheesy to un-forgive someone.

7) Compensation

Compensate the buyer for more than their loss.

My son, Harrison, yesterday told me a story about the cafeteria where he works; it's one of the city's finest and a top pick for business dinners. A rogue waitress melted down and began to insult diners, being rude and unresponsive. The owner fired her on the spot after multiple complaints from diners, together with hand-delivered, written feedback. Harrison had to clean it up with some of the diners. "We bought their entire dinner, and they still were unhappy," he told me. Can you blame them?

The real issue here is that public media accelerates the trip of bad news. If I "dis" a seller on Facebook, hundreds of citizen find out about it. If I Tweet about it, thousands may take notice. That's why you have to make it more than good immediately. (Then again, if you let your network know that you like this article, we both win.)

I propose going beyond their loss and production them come out ahead because of the problem. In the case of the restaurant, after confirming that the paying party was a local, I would have pulled out my business card and hand write a coupon good for 0 at the bar valid for the next month. If they were from out of town, I would have written bar tabs for the locals around the table. You've got to get them back for a great contact as soon as you can to erase the negative night out.

Why a bar tab? Because it's the highest margin item in the cafeteria which means the lowest cost to deliver the compensation. A 0 bar tab costs to deliver and you save a client.

Airlines have been good at this in the case of denied boarding by giving away free air trip and still getting you to your destination, normally in first class (ask for an inconvenience upgrade).

In the case of It, I propose looking for a high margin consumable, such as supplies and training, or accessories and upgrades. They'll have a good contact because of the failure and you'll finally benefit.

So how much should you spend to compensate them? That depends on how important they are. At the very least, you should be willing to spend what it takes to get a new customer. You can theorize this by dividing your marketing funds by the estimate of new customers you get from that budget. For example, if you spend ,000 to get 50 customers, you should be willing to spend at least 0 (00/50) to keep a customer. Some would argue that it's worth more than that. Leave that to your employer to determine.

Create Your Plan

When you choose to use these tactics to implement a perfect-delivery-record strategy, you'll find that you can really recover from a mis-delivery, cementing your association with your buyer and creating a Competition Proof buyer environment.

When Sales Go Wrong: What to Do When You Can't Keep Your Delivery Commitment