Is the delivery of exceptional customer service a skill that can be learned, or are those who excel in customer service simply born for the job? I posed the question recently to a LinkedIn group of customer service professionals, and overwhelmingly they said they were born for customer service…

Said Lizzie Taylor, a CSR for a UK pharmaceutical group, “It certainly has come natural to me.  I’ve always felt as though this was my only real skill. I’ve never needed training on how to deal with difficult customers, how to feel and come across as empathetic, friendly and yet professional.

“However, we’ve all come across those, that sometimes despite feeling like they want to be in customer services, are unsympathetic and unable to place themselves in the customer’s position, and end up several weeks or months later, copying and parroting those who have this natural sense of service.”

Mercuri Systems recently released a new white paper on Sales Efficiency in which they ask, "Are your company's sales leaders/managers soldiers or generals?" Good question.

A phenomenon too often played out is sales managers becoming super sales jocks while the growth and potential of sales reps under these individuals is stifled. Reminiscent of the label during the recent Great Recession that certain banks were "too big to fail," the justification of a manager injecting him or herself into a deal is that a given opportunity is "too big to risk losing."

At this point it is a No Win situation. If the manager does intercede and the deal is won, the rep's growth is put off to another day; a pattern that is likely to repeat such that the rep never really does develop the skill and competence to "land a big one." If the manager stands back, leaves the rep alone and the deal is lost, nothing good results.
Clearly the answer is to get involved much earlier and more frequently in lower risk situations with specific focus and intention.

Mercuri gives examples:

Earlier in my career, I was VP of marketing for a mid-size software company in the content management space.  There were a couple of very large competitors, who we termed “gorillas” in the marketplace.  The VP of sales used to say something to the effect of: “When we get invited to the dance, we can beat our large competitor, but too often, we don’t get invited because they don’t know who we are.”

In this case, the big companies got the business not because they had better products and services, but because they were better in another respect: name recognition.  The marketplace gorillas got invited because potential prospects knew who they were, and they did not know our company.  Although our sales force was just as talented and experienced, they could only win if they had the opportunity to compete.  A big part of our job was to create enough market awareness to get our products and services onto the consideration list.

Remember that not all sales result from a paid sales lead. Ideally, a fair portion of your revenue occurs because a prospect finds you. In other words, they have market awareness about you.  This doesn’t mean they know exactly what you offer, or why you are better or worse than your competitors, but simply that they know you exist and have a vague notion about what you do.  Sometimes, this is all you need to get that invitation to the dance.

Here are some of the non-paid ways prospects can learn about you:

With technical skills such as Java, C++, Python and more in high demand for “Big Data” analytics, it seems like softer business skills such as speaking, writing, planning, leadership, negotiation etc. are falling by the wayside. But the ability to communicate, relate and navigate throughout an organization—so called “softer skills”—are especially needed to propagate analysis and communicate the impact of data-driven decision-making.

Courtesy of Flickr. By coryccreamer

In 2012, cloud computing blogger David Linthicum penned a short piece explaining “3 Winners and 3 Losers in the Move to Big Data”.  In the post Linthicum identified one “loser” as data warehouse and BI specialists, presumably because these folks were accustomed to using languages like old-school SQL and supporting “legacy BI” systems.