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We’ve all done it. We throw a wrench in things with our prospects and customers by not getting them information on time, ordering and shipping the wrong parts, offending one of the decision makers, making promises that we aren’t able to keep, misquoting prices, etc.

There are a million things we can do to damage customer relationships.

When we find ourselves in situations like this we know to initiate all the standard recovery techniques such as bringing in our sales manager for help, readily admitting our errors, etc.

But what if those things don’t work? What if things are stalled and the customer doesn’t appear to budge or, even worse, appears indifferent?

When we find ourselves in this predicament we have a back door. I call it the Control-Alt-Delete Recovery. We’re all familiar with control-alt-delete; it’s the key sequence we hit when we want to reboot and start from scratch with our Windows computer when all else has failed.

When we initiate a Control-Alt-Delete Recovery with prospects and customers we attempt to initiate a second chance with them. By starting all over they see us differently and many times will be open to reconnecting.

There are three primary components of this strategy:

1. New sales team. We need to bring in a new sales team, both salesperson and sales manager. The prospect or customer needs to see all new faces. Once things start to recover there is a possibility that the original team could be slowly re-introduced.
2. Additional decision makers. Obviously we want to continue the relationship with existing decision makers, but we need to add additional decision makers into the mix to help create a new chemistry.
3. New products and services. Not only do we want to bring in new sales faces and add decision makers but we want to introduce some new products and services as well.

The objective is to create a whole new look for our sales approach so that the customer sees us in a different and favorable light. This strategy will take a degree of boldness and humility but it can help us regain momentum.

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Tags: customers

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