SALES & MARKETING SELLING IN THE NEW NORMAL
Rebuilding Relationships Post COVID BY RANDY SQUIBB
I Randy Squibb is available for Customer Relations presentations and can be reached by email at crsquibb@aol.com.
78 • Fall 2021
’ve been in the welding and gas business for more than 50 years. I truly thought I had seen it all. But this past year and a half has truly been both the best of times and the worst of times in this industry. And, I promise, when I include the best of times in that sentence, I’m not going crazy! But before I get into how it has been the best of times, I think we can all agree that the past year and a half has been pretty bad. We all went through some tough times. But those who know me best know that I don’t like to dwell on the negatives. I like to concentrate on the positives and look around the corner to see that we’re headed to bluer skies. Now that we’ve seemingly moved beyond the worst that COVID has to offer and begun to return to a sense of normalcy, it’s time to start rebuilding our relationships. If you’ve read my previous articles, you know that I value strong relationships above just about anything. And you also know that there is a huge difference between customer service and customer relations. Customers can get good customer service just about anywhere. But they buy from and return to people they have relationships with. And when COVID shut a huge part of our world down, those relationships suffered. But the good news is that even if our relationships with our customers and prospects changed, so did our competitors’. And now we have the opportunity to go out and build those relationships back stronger than they ever were before. Here are a few simple but effective tips to build new relationships and deepen existing ones.
INTERNAL CUSTOMERS When we say customers, we tend to focus on our outside customers. But I believe our employees are our internal customers. And, due to work from home orders or forced social distancing, we need to make sure we rebuild our relationships with our internal customers as well. At the height of the pandemic, many “non-essential” employees were forced to work from home, spending all day behind the computer desk or on the phone. But, as we know, our industry is an essential industry, which meant that even if some of our people couldn’t be in the office, our operations had to continue to function business as usual. Which means that while we as salespeople were tucked behind our computers in our underwear all day (don’t pretend you didn’t have days like that!), our drivers, our pumpers and our counter people continued to show up day after day to make things happen. We were still working hard, but these frontline employees were making things happen and we owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude. Make sure they know how much you noticed and appreciated their effort. Even if it’s a $25 gift card to Walmart. Just go up to them and say, “It’s been a tough year and a half, and I know that you were here every day, and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you guys doing the things that made a difference. Thank you.” You really need to go out of your way to thank these people. And particularly those of you who are in outside sales. Most people in the organization aspire to be in outside sales and look at the outside sales-
