Making your customers successful

Making your customers successful 

If you want to build a growth company, you must be customer focused. And that means waking up every day and asking, 

“What can I do to make my customers successful?”

Your customer’s success is your success, so it is in your best interest to make your customer as successful as possible. That doesn’t mean giving away your products and services. It does mean enabling your customer to tap the full potential of what you’re selling and to assist your customer even when that assistance doesn’t directly boost sales.

Take the time to get to know their business, their vision, their strategies for growth, their target customers, and their pain points. Talk with them and share your ideas for helping them be more successful.

You may be called on to offer your customer some free advice, refer them to other companies for products and services you don’t sell, or even do a little head-hunting for them to steer them in the direction of the most qualified personnel in your area.

Become your own customer, as much as possible. Try to buy the same product or one that’s similar to what you sell from another salesperson to discover insights from your customer’s point of view. (You don’t actually have to buy it.)

As an entrepreneurial salesperson, always think one step ahead. This means considering your customer’s customer. The single most important contribution you can make to your customer’s success is contributing to the success of your customer’s customer.

In many cases, this is primarily the responsibility of your company’s CEO or product development division, but because you probably have more direct contact with customers, you may need to carry the message back to your company. If you’re selling to a business that sells your product to consumers, keep that consumer, the end user, in mind.

But above all: be fair, be honest, do what you say you’re going to do, and deliver on time and within budget. 

Christiaan Janssens
Executive Coach

CRO @ Spa Akwa Belgium

Consultative Selling

Consultative selling

A big part of training salespeople these days is helping them to differentiate themselves from everyone else. This is accomplished by effectively applying a consultative sales process: the salesperson has a conversation with a decision maker that is unlike any conversation the competition has had. It uncovers the convincing reasons for spending money, changing vendors, buying a product or service and, as important, buying it from you. That creates urgency, an encouragement for a prospect to self-qualify, so that you don’t have to pull teeth getting a prospect qualified. The end result should be a prospect that is willing to spend more to do business with you, and a sales cycle that is not based on winning on price.

Example:

A salesman met a customer that had moved their business to a competitor because of price issues. It sounded like they were getting what they were paying for:

- Paying more for freight,

- Finding variations in the product,

- Stocking more inventory than necessary because of availability problems

So far so good. The salesman had done enough to at least uncover some issues and, while these aren’t persuasive reasons, additional questions would lead us to these. What he should have done:

He should have asked, “How important is it to have continued availability of quality, local inventory?” The customer would have said, “Extremely important”, the salesman would have said, “Tell me how that would affect your business”, and we would have gotten closer to the persuasive reasons.

What the salesman did instead:

He asked, “If you had access to local delivery, through a distributor, and the price was competitive, would you consider looking into this?”

The horror of the question was that the salesman introduced an unnecessary criterion: competitive pricing for doing business with him. What’s wrong with that? Two things:

- Even if you wanted to be the low priced seller, and they don’t, if you don’t have a competitive price, you don’t get the business!

- He didn’t need to offer competitive pricing, because he sold value! He identified the problem and offered a solution to a problem. That is the value someone will pay for and he undermined it by bringing the customer’s attention back to price!

The lesson:

The reality is that there are only four reasons why price becomes an issue:

- The salesman made it an issue (experience)

- The salesman accepted that it was an issue (non supportive beliefs)

- The salesman didn’t know how to prevent it from being an issue (tactics)

- The salesman was foolishly calling on purchasing instead of an actual decision maker who owned a problem or an opportunity (strategy).