How Your Employees can STOP Sounding Like It’s 1992 When They Talk With Customers! – in Just 7 Minutes with Lenann McGookey Gardner

Related Links and Resources:

The website is www.youcanleadcoaching.com and the resource is our newsletter 'Smart Boss’ and if they'd like to give us a call, well do a free 3-15 minutes just to have a conversation about the topic of customer service.

Summary:

Len-ann McGookey Gardner is a coach to business leaders in 53 countries around the world. From CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to entrepreneurs just starting out, she’s the go-to resource for getting and keeping the customers that make you successful! Lenann’s a Harvard MBA who launched 2 new brands -- one did 150 million dollars in sales in Year 1, and the other did 60 million dollars in its first 6 months.

She’s won the “Top Performing CEO” award, the Marketer of the Year Award, she’s the author of 2 books.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

1:43 Lenann’s ideal Client: Probably a business owner who hasn't updated the communication skills of his or her frontline employees in too long.

2:02 Problem Lenann helps solve: Lousy, time-wasting, customer service.

2:27 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Lenann: Probably the emotions are frustrations. You know, "why aren't these people paying attention." Just get focus, pay attention to these people, talk nice to them, don't ruin these relationships that are so valuable to our future. And the emotion is frustration because you think you've been clear; "look pay attention" but that's never enough.

3:05 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding Lenann and her solution: The biggest mistake is, we think 'do as I do'; watch me, let me show you how to do it. I'm teaching this to some extent because some people say "Lenann, show us how to do this, we'll do what you do" but that's not appropriate because not everybody has my personality or your personality. So, the customer service experience is partly determined by the personality of the employee. They're not going to do it exactly the same as the big boss but I hope they are going to do some principles that are up to date, that are 21st century principles from what people are expecting now.

4:07 Lenann’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): The topic of 'trust' is really interesting because trust is really something that exist almost nowhere anymore. Nobody trusts nobody about nothing. It's very challenging to get someone to trust you and trust is usually a precursor to buying something from you. I don't buy from people that I don't trust, I figured that I'm going to get hurt. Trust is something that you can learn about and it happens to a couple of my classmates and graduate schools who studied the topic, published books, they're very well-known, they've done a lot of things with it but how to create trust or at least how to encourage trust in the people you're dealing with. To me, it would be the one simple short thing. And in my most recent book (Win More Clients) I did four pages on that topic because I want people to understand that trust is more valuable than money now. If you have enough trust, it will turn into money.

5:26 Lenann’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): The website is youcanleadcoaching.com and the resource is our newsletter 'Smart Boss' but I've spoken with your staff and they said "you should be willing to talk with our listeners" so, I'm willing to talk with your listeners. If they'd like to give us a call, we'll do a free 3-15 minutes just to have a conversation about the topic of customer service and how so many companies are falling behind and losing business as a result.

6:20 Is it possible to grow a business when you have the pandemic on, we got fires in California, we got all kinds of scary things happening. Can you grow a business in the face of all that? I think you can absolutely grow a business at this time. A lot of the pundits would say " the most successful businesses in the world started the recession" and there's truth to that. But the truth about the situation of our country's in now, at least for American listeners, is that we've been in the circumstances we're in now for quite awhile. How long are we going to use the pandemic let's say as an excuse for not moving forward? And I think "I'm done!" let's move forward. And if folks don't want to, then I think you have to look in the mirror and say "why is it I no longer want to grow my business?"