Your Sleeping Dogs Can Bite You

In sales, customer service, and leadership, the cultivation of ignorant customers and followers is common, and figuratively lethal.

“We call those customers our sleeping dogs.”

The senior executive who said this was referring to customers who were being overcharged. You know, the customers who are really profitable?  The ones who are ignorant of their bad deal?

The executive referred to them as his “sleeping dogs” to honor an unspoken policy that loudly said “let sleeping dogs lie.”  As in, don’t bother a customer who is content to stay with a bad deal.

They exist in many businesses. In the cable and wireless space, they are the ones whose better deal is literally a few minutes away by phone. In the industrial space, they are the customers who have taken annual price increases loyally until their current deal is so far out of market that they could hire the procurement professional they sorely need if they only asked for a market price re-set.

The problem with this executive’s thinking is this:  Sleeping dogs bite.

A Matter of Service, and Ethics…

It’s a fact of life that if you choose not to serve your customers, somebody else will. A corollary to that is that if you bank on the ignorance of your customers, you are banking on a very fleeting thing.

Now, I’ve gone far enough so that some of you are thinking I’m writing about really unethical behavior, but that is only partly the case.

Sure, a company that charges your grandmother $25 a month for the Sunday paper (true story…) is profiting from the ignorance of a customer, but such behavior rarely passes the red face test when it’s found out.

The Lost Art of Calling on Customers

The reality is that in the realm of good sales and customer service, we treat far, far too many customers as sleeping dogs even when we are making only a fair profit from them.

You know why?

It’s the same reason our executive at the start of the story had: We are scared of our customer. We are scared that we might learn of our own shortcomings, or how unhappy the customer really is (but just hasn’t gotten around to firing your company).

In the modern world of sales and service (well, at least dating back to the fax machine), many transactions can be carried out virtually and without human interaction. Also, because many younger people have grown up without actually calling on people or interacting with them (I’m talking to you, Millennials), customers are being left alone as sleeping dogs far more often than in the past.

Combine that with a healthy dose of conflict avoidance on the part of many of the sleeping dogs, and you have a recipe for customer defection.

The Learning Applies to Leaders, Too

Don’t kid yourself that there aren’t also a lot followers who could be considered sleeping dogs as well.  You know them?  They are the people who are making 70% of the salary of the guy next to them while doing twice the work.

They deserve better customer service, too.  If you know this inequitable circumstance exists, and bank on it; you are right there with the friendly senior executive in my starting paragraph.  No, I'm not saying that we should all go out and re-trade our employees' comp plans, I'm saying that your tolerance for inequity is a defining trait of your leadership profile.  We all have some tolerance for it, some of us to the extreme.  If you are found out by your followers as a leader who readily and enthusiastically allows a follower to sell himself too cheaply; you will lose their trust.

Count on it.

So What…

What this means is that in your customer service, sales, and leadership approaches, you have to embed a much better appreciation for sensing what customers are thinking. Sometimes, it’s a simple phone call from a customer service rep to see what is working (or not). Sometimes, sure, it’s a customer survey. Sometimes, yes, it’s an active sales effort to re-set pricing with customers or employees whose deals are, shall we say, out of market.

In doing so, you will create better customer and employee loyalty, you will learn more about your own company’s strengths and weaknesses, and you just might generate a moment of truth that brings in a few more customers via referrals and good press.

A customer loss is a damaging thing. In most industries, the cost of customer acquisition is far higher than the true cost of retention. The same is true (in spades) for employees.  A customer or employee lost to negligence is far worse—kind of like a dog bite.

When it comes to your sales, service, and leadership approach, beware letting sleeping dogs lie.

The near-term profit is rarely worth the long-term pain.

I welcome your thoughts and reflections.

A version of this article first appeared on the WGP Blog here.  

Geoff Wilson is a strategy executive focused on the articulation of practical strategic principles for leadership and performance. He is Founder and Principal of Wilson Growth Partners LLC, a management consulting firm.

Follow on twitter: @GeoffTWilson

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