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Like so many women I have interviewed, Linda Richardson never intended to have a business career.

She did not plan on starting a sales performance company (Richardson) that has been named a Top 20 Sales Training company for six consecutive years.

She did not plan on starting a company that would have a global presence.

She did not plan on selling that company.

But, for Linda, like many of us, life does not go as planned!

An English major and an avid reader, Linda pursued a graduate degree in educational psychology. Soon thereafter Linda serendipitously found herself hired at the Institute for Emotive Therapy’s (now known as the Albert Ellis Institute) school. I say serendipitously because working there was one of the turning points in her career. While teaching there Linda regularly observed world renowned psychologist Albert Ellis’s clinical sessions. His masterful questioning of clients had a profound impact on Linda’s way of thinking and eventually lay the foundation for her concept of consultative selling.

In 1975 New York City hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. All teachers who had not earned tenure were let go. Linda, who was an untenured principal, was among them. It was a discouraging time for Linda and the city. Jobs were difficult to find and Linda was having no luck in securing another education position. A friend arranged for her to interview with Manufacturers Hanover (which became Chemical Bank and eventually part of JP Morgan Chase). Linda was reluctant to go,(“I know nothing about business” she told her interviewer) but lacking a viable alternative she went on the interview and was hired to head up the bank’s training.

Banking was just becoming competitive (deregulation opened opportunities and changed the landscape) and banks were actually competing for customers. Linda was charged with “finding a sales training program” for the bankers. Much to her chagrin they were all not relevant to the bankers sales situations and had examples like “selling tractors and things.” Linda was convinced that she could develop a better product and the first thing she had to do was sell her boss on the idea. Having sold her boss on the idea she partnered with the trust department which needed this “new” skill set. Relying on her experience as a teacher and using her observations of Ellis’ clinical questioning, Linda changed selling which to that point was product focused.

Jill Konrath wrote the books that she wanted to read because nobody else had.

It’s that kind of agility, energy and seemingly insatiable curiosity that has propelled Jill Konrath from home economics to the corporate arena and then to the life of “a quiet consultant in Minneapolis” and finally to blaze a trail as a widely followed author, speaker and sales guru. Fortune Magazine declared her first book, Selling to Big Companies, a “must read” for sales professionals. Her second book Snap Selling is the top ranked sales book on Amazon.com. Book number three, The Agile Seller will be published in 2014 and book number four, Snapping Back is on the drawing board!

Like many of the women I have spoken with, it is not the path that Jill envisioned for herself or initially embarked upon. Her professional career began as a home economics teacher but it quickly became clear to Jill that this was not the best path for her. However, Jill continues to teach and guide others. Now the life skills that she helps others learn are not sewing and cooking but rather agility, resilience and a sales process that gets results.

Another way that Jill is like the other women I have interviewed is her willingness to take calculated risks. Unable to find a job after she left teaching she decided to start her own business with some other twenty something’s who were also searching for careers that were a better fit. Following a year of methodical research they had a plan which they shared with a SCORE member, a retired General Mills executive.

He declared the idea fabulous but then asked “but who is going to sell it?”

As Jill put it “I thought a great idea didn’t need to be sold but I drew the short straw,” she would be the organization’s sales person.

Question: "Do you expect your customer relationship management (CRM) tools and Social Apps to enable you to do your job better?"

Answer: "Yes!  Of course!"

This past September, we determined that CRM tools and Social Apps used to acquire and retain our customers were not enabling us to do our work better.

The word enabling means it should optimize value-added (VA) activities and minimize non-value-added (NVA) activities. Lean methodology defines a VA activity as a work activity where the following characteristics all hold true:

If any of the above is violated, then by definition the activity is a NVA. For example, cutting and pasting, clicking several times to get what you need, reviewing, and rework are all NVAs.

In this edition of Gobsmacked™TV:

It takes guts.

It takes guts to cross Himalayan Mountains in India by trapeze and it takes guts to leave the region you grew up in to take a “big” job in a “big” city with one of the biggest companies in the country.

Harlina Sodhi has guts! Harlina Sodhi is now the Senior Vice President and Head of Employee Engagement, Communication and Diversity at Reliance Industries, India’s largest private company. Despite its size, it is somewhat unlikely that you are familiar with Reliance, unless you are from India and/or are familiar with the oil and gas industry. Harlina is going to change that! For the past five months she has had a portfolio that includes Leadership development, training, communication, both internal and external as well as employee engagement.

Her ambitious goal is to make people

“as aware of Reliance as they are of Apple or Google…to make them drool to get a job with us.”

If anybody can make a conglomerate with a strong petrochemical and energy component become an enticing and exciting place to work I have no doubt that it is Harlina!

So how did this energetic and passionate woman transform herself from a Xerox copier sales person from a small town to a respected member of the senior leadership team in one of India’s largest organizations headquartered in India’s financial and corporate capital Mumbai? I think that a big part of the answer relates to energy and attitude. More than once during our hour-long conversation Harlina reiterated

“I always say yes, Sherry. I say yes then I can figure out the rest.”

Business relationships are not this intuitive (though I contend they should be), but let me ask you this (if you’re in a long-term relationship, think back to when you were single).

When you started dating, you had opportunities to begin and pursue relationships. How did you make the choice of which woman/man to pursue? Was it the best looking? The smartest? Maybe the most accessible or one you thought would say yes? And if you were lucky enough to have several people from which to choose, into which relationships did you invest your effort? Was it with the cutest partner? The one who seemed most likely to succeed? The one most likely to commit to you?

I’d be willing to bet you made these decisions based on some form of intuition. You probably agonized, analyzed and got lots of advice from your friends and family, but some sense of the “right” choice probably made itself apparent, and off you went.

Do you know why your customers renew their subscriptions or services? Do you know how to predict whether any given customer will renew? I suspect you probably have an answer something like, “Well, yes, but it could be better.”

So let’s make it better.

And let’s make better marketing investment decisions by doing so.

Here’s a scenario that will disturb most of you: You are happily in a long-term committed relationship. Then you meet someone interesting, attractive and with a personality similar to your current partner. You figure your current partner isn’t going anywhere, so you spend lots of time developing a new relationship with this new person. You spend time together, you spend money on gifts and activities, and you find you have common interests. You end up in a relationship with this new person. Are you still assuming your first partner hasn’t gone anywhere? I think we can all agree that’s a pretty bad assumption.

So why do we treat our customers this way?

Delta Airlines employs more than 80,000 employees worldwide and has a fleet of more than 700 aircrafts and has 160 million customers.

It has a reputable social-media operation. Or so we have read...

In an article written by Dennis Schaal, Inside Social Media at Delta Air Lines - A Behind The Scenes Look on June 10, 2011, he mentions that they have a control room just for social media at their headquarters, and that they knowingly don't respond to all tweets, stating: "The social media staff doesn't respond to every tweet about the airline, and does its share of apologizing to customers."

At PAKRA, we decided to dive a little deeper and experiment with the Twittersphere for Delta Airlines and see exactly what is going on. We wanted to get few questions answered:

(1.) Since Delta knowingly doesn’t respond to every tweet about the brand, would they be more likely to respond to tweets that areincluded in the “Dreaded” hash-tag #Fail search? As you know, if this hash-tag is included in a tweet about your brand, the customer is probably quite upset with your brand and you are at risk to lose them as a customer. Surely, Delta will respond to all of “these” tweets. Right?

(2.) Why does Delta not respond to all tweets? As we see from the article by Dennis Schaal, Delta has about a dozen "Social Assist Agents" on a 24x7 follow-the-sun support schedule. What stops them from handling more tweets, especially potentially harmful ones like those that include "#Fail" in their tweet?

We analyzed all tweets in a randomly selected time period that included the name "Delta" with the hash-tag #Fail in the tweet text.

You must have read this recent article, “Three Months in Customer Service Limbo”, by David Segal in the New York Times. The article discusses the fate of a customer at the hands of customer service, customer's trials and small successes, and well! spoiler alert -- "Still! Unresolved issues". Oh! What drama. I suggest you read it too.

It is time for us to Occupy Customer Experience.

You, the (B2B or B2C) Customer

As you searched, vetted, purchased, used and reviewed products/services that will help you, you too experienced some degree of failure or had instances where your expectations were not met (if not to this extreme degree in the Times article). Some of you also use social-media channels such as Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Yelp to communicate your frustrations and delights. Some of you will also agree with me that Revenue and Operational Margins are the two KPIs that your company/organization/institution closely manages.

You, the Manager

Given that you and your team deliver products/services, you are always looking for ways to increase your revenue while reducing operating costs. Among all channels of customer interaction (voice, chat, web, face-to-face and social media), social media is still the cheapest way to find and manage customers who reach out to you via social media.  Also, let’s not forget the amplification effect on your brand. Who can forget the Alec Baldwin tweet on American Airlines, or the Komen Foundation fiasco with Planned Parenthood?

"Customer Experience" is why companies/organizations/institutions exist. Customer experience drives both revenue and operational costs. Your customers are just like you; they want to do business with you using these channels. What is stopping you from delivering exceptional customer experience?

Coming Soon at a PAKRA channel near to you – "Thought-provoking Discussions". Please join the discussion.