Blog Archive
The Worst Question a Service Rep Can Ask
January 5, 2022
Portions of the following blog are excerpts from our book, The Effortless Experience That title probably caught your attention, so without making…
Customer Service: Greasing the Wheels of Wallet Spend
January 2, 2022
Last year, I had a bad customer service experience. It was a months-long struggle to receive a refund on a very beautiful and very broken chandelier.…
Crawl, Walk, Run Customer Service
December 7, 2021
A close cousin of the statement that “doctors make the worst patients” might be that “customer service professionals make the worst customers.” I…
A Factory of Sadness
November 10, 2021
Years ago, back in our CEB days, we used to share a slide that labeled the contact center a “Factory of Sadness.” It resulted in nervous laughs…
How to avoid the Great Resignation with Good Engagement
September 24, 2021
In Gartner’s recent 2021 Customer Service Rep Role and Experience Survey, data shows that only one in three reps are actually engaged; the remaining…
Three Steps to Make Good Sales Advice Stick
September 22, 2021
“To profit from good advice requires more wisdom than to give it.” – American Playwright Wilson Mizner There’s no shortage of good sales advice.…
Commercial Teaching: More Than Just An Early-Stage Strategy
May 25, 2021
In our most recent Winning the Challenger Sales Webinar, we went deep on "Discovery" calls and shared some tips for how to leverage "high-gain"…
How Do Challengers Negotiate?
March 23, 2021
“The first step is the hardest”. It’s what we say to encourage each other to get going. The same is true in sales. Shifting the customer’s initial…
Challenger Skills Part 3: Which Skills Are Most Important in 2021?
February 23, 2021
This post concludes a series we began a few weeks ago: Our first post looked at the distribution of sellers by profile in 2020, using the same…
Challenger Skills Part 2: What has changed in 2020?
February 16, 2021
Last week, I shared a snapshot of our ongoing Challenger assessment data and how Challengers in 2020, moving into 2021, are disproportionately more…
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