Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It’s Only Common Sense: Silence Is Not Always Golden

A few years ago, I worked with a client who won and then lost 30 customers in the span of 10 months. They had bought the customer base of a company that was going out of business. They also hired a few key people from that company to help with the transition of bringing that customer base into their facility. The good news was that they successfully moved almost all the key customers into the company. The bad news is that a few months later they were all gone. They had lost all of these new customers.

I can hear you asking, “Why did this happen?” Simple: They paid no attention to the silence. The fact is that their delivery performance had always been deplorable. Their on-time delivery performance was less than 83% (which, by the way, is the industry average).

But that’s not the worst part of this story. The worst part is that they didn’t care that their performance was so poor. When we tried to tell them that they were going to lose customers if they didn’t start delivering on time, they scoffed and said they’d had customers for years and those customers never complained about it. Which was true; for whatever reason those customers stayed with them until they couldn’t take it anymore, and since their current overall sales number was less than half of what it had once been, I guess that the customers did care. They had just given up complaining years before and now they were slowly leaving one by one.

As for the 30 new customers, they had options. Those first orders from them, as always, were audition orders to see how they would perform, and alas they performed miserably and lost those customers rather quickly because those customers were not invested enough and did not care enough to complain.

When customers stop complaining, it can only mean one of two things. The first is that your company is now performing better, and they have nothing more to complain about; and the second is that your service is not improving, they are tired of putting up with it, and they are slowly moving away.

The key here is to figure out which scenario is happening. If your performance has not improved, it’s a pretty good indicator that they are not bothering to complain any longer and are simply voting with their feet.

Here are a few indicators to help you realize when this is happening:

• Your salesperson is having a difficult time getting appointments with buyers. They always seem to be too busy to talk; no matter how much she tries to get in or get through to them, they don’t pick up the phone or return her calls and emails.
• The number of orders they place is slowly dropping. Not significantly at first, because it takes time to replace a vendor with legacy parts, but your customer is slowly moving part numbers away from you.
• When they do finally talk with your people, there is never talk about the future. They just make small talk about the weather or sports, but never about where their company is going. That’s a sure sign that they don’t see a future with you.
• You have not seen any new part numbers or projects in months. I can assure you that they have new projects and part numbers, but once again you are not being considered as part of their future.
• You are not invited to vendor conferences. This is an obvious one. Many of the better companies hold vendor conferences, bringing in all their preferred vendors to discuss where they are today and where they will be in the future. But once again, they will only invite those vendors who will be part of their future. Not being invited to vendor day is a pretty good indicator that you are on your way out.

If your company is experiencing any of these subtle clues, or if you have stopped hearing complaints from your customers, then you had better start worrying. In this case, no news is not good news and silence is definitely not golden. You had better start listening to the silence and putting together an all-hands-on-deck emergency plan to win those customers back, before it’s too late.

It’s only common sense.