Customer Relationship Management: Rules of Engagement

By Tope Popoola

People are the oxygen of meaningful enterprise. The business of the 21st Century is about making and retaining customers. Profit is in people, not products. Knowing that the customer is the "WHY?" of business is the key to significance and sustainable success in the marketplace.

If the customer is so important, how do we get and sustain his attention and patronage?

If you are looking for a practical guide on how to connect with, manage and "waoh!" the customer in a way that he becomes an evangelist for your enterprise, look no further. This book is filled with down-to-earth, immediately useable principles designed to take your business to where it truly belongs - the customer's heart!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tope Popoola
• Release date: Aug 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201263539

Tope Popoola

THE AUTHOR ‘Tope Popoola is a man of many parts but only ONE passion – cultivating men and women of influence and affluence for whom Godly excellence is a culture. A widely travelled and highly sought-after conference speaker and Life Coach to several corporate executives and professionals, he is a Certified Management Consultant, Professional Mediator/Negotiator, Certified Agile Scrum Master and professional Trainer who speaks regularly on Leadership, Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship. He has been instrumental to the training of leaders from over 40 nations. He serves on the International Faculty of Haggai International, a world-class Christian Leadership Training institute. He writes a weekly column “Empowered For L.I.F.E (Leadership. Impact. Finances. Excellence)” in the Nigerian Tribune, a Nigerian national newspaper. He is the host of a TV programme, “Enterprise 101 with Tope Popoola”. As a Pastor, he is the Founding Pastor of THE BUSINESS CHURCH (Luke 2:49)

Book preview

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to the memory of

Oluwatomiisin Oluwafunmilayo Popoola (1955-2020),

an angel who endured my imperfections for 33 years

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gratitude:

To God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – my SOURCE. In your wisdom I find my treasure and my inspiration

To my Mentors – We stand tallest when we stand on the shoulders of giants

To my Queen Caroline – your price is way above rubies

To my children – for always making me proud to be a father

To my clients – for giving me the platforms to teach these principles

To YOU – for picking up this book.

FIRST WORDS

Who is this book for ? If you fall into any of the categories listed below, you picked the right book!

The accomplished sales leader who desires to know and do more.

The rookie salesman who is yet to make his first sale.

The sales team lead who desires to build an effective team.

The CEO who is bothered about dwindling market share.

The HR Manager who wants to build a great relationship with the internal customer.

The budding entrepreneur who is trying to chart his road-to-market journey.

The corporate boss who desires an enhanced bottom-line.

The Brand Manager who needs to shore up Brand Equity in the marketplace.

The curious seeker who just wants to know why people even buy anything.

The Godly person who has been having challenges finding the nexus between the scriptures and his function in the marketplace.

The agnostic who thinks that God has no place in the marketplace.

Whether we know it or not, everyone is selling something. We are all carriers of value and therefore in the business of connecting that value to people who need it. As long as there is a problem that your value proposition solves and you can find people who need that solution, (note that I didn’t say ‘product’) you are in sales! Whether we are making a business pitch to potential investors, or we are facing an interview panel, we are selling something. When boy meets girl and he presents his ‘manifesto’ with intention of ending up with a date or eventual marriage commitment, a value is being proposed.  The activity that underpins these everyday exchanges is simply known as selling. A sale happens when you can effectively communicate and connect the value (a.k.a service, product, idea, skill, knowledge) that you are offering to someone else who is willing to part with commensurate value in exchange for the one you are offering.

Business is nothing but an exchange of value. Zig Ziglar has defined sales as the transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. In this broad, albeit generic sense therefore, as long as we produce a value that we are enthusiastic enough to want to convey or connect with others, we are all in one form of business or the other and we all have customers, actual or potential. Reduced further to a basic minimum, we all have customers. Even if you are currently an employee getting paid for rendering certain services, your employer is your customer. As an employer of labour, your employee is your first customer. So, the question is not, Can I or should I sell?. It is, What exactly am I selling, how and to who? A sale is what happens when you can convince a customer that his money serves him better in your pocket than in his! A chapter is dedicated to this concept.

Simply defined, customer relationship management is about the ability to initiate, manage and sustain the various interplays between a business’ internal and external clients. The interplay encompasses issues of loyalty, promotion, product presentation, interactions, connections, communication, reliable database, customer service, orders, and any other matters that would enhance the way we do business with the customer. The business of the 21st Century is not just the sale of a product or a value proposition. It is about making, growing and retaining customers. The product or solution that we offer is merely a vehicle for accomplishing this objective. People are the oxygen that sustains business.

In March of 2016, I was invited to an academic conference at the University of Texas in Austin, USA to present a paper. I was perhaps the only presenter who was not from mainstream academia. In one of the breakout sessions, there was a panel on entrepreneurship. Eager to learn some new things about business and the marketplace, I was excited to join that class as a participant. There were three workshop presentations at the session and each of the presenters was a Professor in Business/Entrepreneurship studies. They reeled out charts, formulae, quotations and statistics with so many theories that I thought I was back in a High School science class being trained to perform experiments with some creepy creatures all over again! It was all very confusing! At the end of the presentations, I asked one question, As erudite and scholarly as these ideas have been, which of the theories and postulations presented here could be broken down into a simple digestible format that I as a practicing entrepreneur could immediately find useful in the marketplace? None of the presenters could answer my question.

Mindful of not putting the reader through what was for me a harrowing experience, I have tried to ensure that this is not your regular book with a lot of technical textbook jargon and charts. It is written in simple language that breaks down the subject matter into simple, useable language that yields it to practical, hands-on applicability. A few of the chapters in the book have been featured in some of my earlier books. They are reproduced with some adjustments here because of their relevance to the subject of discourse.

Let’s get down to business and enjoy the invaluable nuggets that it offers.

ONE

THE POWER OF CONNECTIONS – The Psychology of Selling

Do you remember the colouring and activity books in elementary school where you were asked to connect dots to form an image? When the dots are not appropriately connected, the image is distorted. But when properly connected, the image becomes clearly discernible. To become a player in the marketplace, you must create or add a significant value that solves a significant problem for a significant number of people in a significant way that makes them want to reward you significantly.

From this statement, it is very clear that creating a value is not enough. There are several people who have created a value or who have several ideas that can, literally speaking, ‘save the world’ but who are very broke. Several of them die in frustration and penury. History also has a record of many like that.

Today, a Rembrandt painting (even a copy) would command a premium in an art auction. Yet the Dutch painter died in obscurity and penury, deserted by friends and family! How about Vincent van Gogh? The eccentric but prolific painter of abstracts only sold one painting in his entire lifetime. Today a mere sketch with the signature of Van Gogh is a collector’s item that would retail for millions of dollars at an auction! All over the world today, no art school or discussion around visual art is complete without the mention of or study of the works of these two men.

Matthew Brady, now known as the father of photojournalism, produced the best photographs of the American Civil War, spending his entire fortune in the process. Unfortunately, after the war, nobody was willing to buy them from him. He died poor. Edgar Allan Poe is today celebrated as one of classical literature’s most cerebral poets. He also died in penury.

Value created or ideas on their own don’t prosper anyone. The value and its intrinsic essence or problem-solving capacity must be communicated to a relevant market where it will be appreciated and adequately rewarded. This must be done in such a way that connects first with the emotions and subsequently, the pocket of the customer.

Why is this sequence so vital? I am sure you have had the experience of a visit from a desperate but glib salesperson. He has a potentially excellent product but in his conversation with you about it, it appears that all that he wants is just to make you part with money in order to meet a target. He is not addressing how you feel, what your current experiences are that would warrant the relevance of the service or product, whether or not this is the right time and space for the purchase or any other thing that could guide an intelligent decision. Do you remember how irritated you felt about the entire encounter? Perhaps you have fallen for such antics but when you eventually discovered that your emotions could not adequately justify the purchase, even the memory of such an encounter makes you angry! Why? Meaningful buying decisions are first emotional before they are economic. This is one thought that you will find running through this book and for emphasis, repeated several times!

When our emotions connect appropriately with a value, whether it is a product or service, a skill or even a job that some might consider dead-end, we would pay any price necessary to have it. This is why some people would not even consider quitting a job that some others would find unbefitting! Create, communicate, connect, collect!

In the marketplace of life, success is a function of connections. The more you can connect, the more successful you will become. This is why it is not the people with the highest IQ that succeed most. You can have a chain of degrees from Ivy League universities and still not be significantly successful. Many with intimidating credentials and skills still end up as employees to those who are able to transfer their enthusiasm around a value that they have created to others through market-driven enterprise. Highly skilled people are usually employed by people who are considered less intelligent but who have mastered the art of making appropriate connections.

Every product, service, skill, idea, knowledge is a code of value or simply put, a code of solutions. We all have this code even if we don’t know it. To succeed significantly, there are SIX connections that we must learn to make in the market where we offer our value code:

People Connecting with People

In 1979, as an undergraduate,