This week during a coaching session, I talked to a client about customer experience and told me the story about how five years ago, before he had opened up his second location, he was on the hunt for a great steak to put on the menu.

 So he’d call round to one of the butchers at the time, and he’d asked his butcher for a steak explaining what he was trying to do; the butcher gave him a couple of steaks, went home, and my client opened up these steaks to test them out, and he was disappointed: the steaks were rubbish they weren’t good quality at all.

 He’d throw them on the grill, cooked them up, and his suspicions were confirmed they just weren’t great steaks at all, and as a result, he decided that he wasn’t going to use that butcher, and he found somebody else and has been using that person ever since.

Now, the interesting thing is that he crunched the numbers and realised that he had spent over a million pounds over the last five years on steak. The butcher he went to, the one that didn’t take enough care and attention to put together an excellent sample steak package for him to try, had missed out on a million pounds worth of revenue over the last five years; that is massive! All because he didn’t take enough care and attention.

The same client told me about a story where he recently enquired to another company about a service that he’s looking for. They hadn’t got back to him after five days, and he said that he wasn’t going to use them he was going to go with somebody else that he’d been speaking to again, someone has missed out on another opportunity, so what can you get from these two stories?

Well, first of all, are you treating every single opportunity like it’s a one million pound steak customer? Are you taking care and attention to make sure that you look after all of your inquiries properly and give them all of the attention and care they need? Are your processes robust enough, are your people properly trained, and do you have the visibility to make sure that you understand exactly what’s going on? The other side of that is, are you responsive enough? Are you responding to all of your inquiries in good time?

When it comes to sales: speed stuns, make sure that you are responsive, make sure that you take the proper care and attention, and your conversion rate is bound to be higher.

If you’re looking for more new business advice, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business”

Marco Soares is an award-winning business coach based in Sussex and is available if you’d like help implementing any of the tactics from “Mind Your Own Business”.