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).

Questions That Turn Prospects Into Customers

The right questions in a sales conversation

When you are having a conversation with a prospect, work these questions into the dialogue. Once you've the answers, you'll know what you must do to turn the prospect into a new customer.

How did you get into this line of work?

What do you like best about your job?

What do you wish you could improve?

What can you tell me about your priorities?

How are you currently addressing this problem?

How much is this problem costing you?

What can you tell me about your decision-making process?

Do you take the decision? Who else?

How do you handle budget considerations?

What other options are you looking at?

What can you tell me about the people involved in the process?

What obstacles might be in the way of moving this forward?

How will you be evaluating different options?

How will the funding for the project be justified?

How much attention is this problem getting at the executive level?

How does this sound as a next step? Describe, please.

A good example of a bad sales conversation:

Robert De Niro in Analyze That:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivGF-wj5GpQ

The Voice of the Customer (VoC)

The Voice of the Customer

Quality can be defined as meeting customer needs and providing superior value. Meeting customer needs requires that those needs be understood. The Voice of the Customer is the term to describe the stated and unstated customer needs or requirements.

Up to a few years ago, when companies wanted to know what their customers were thinking, they just asked. It sounds simple enough, but it was anything but. Companies painstakingly pulled together a large random sampling of their customers and then overwhelmed them with dozens of questions about anything they could cram into a half-hour telephone survey. They mailed out questionnaires they hoped customers would fill out and return. They brought a handful of customers together for focus group sessions that could last several hours. Then along came the internet, and companies embraced email and the web to poll their customers without incurring high phone or postage costs.

In any case, collecting customer feedback was a massive undertaking that few companies did more than once a year and response rates were typically very low. Survey fatigue was rampant, mostly because surveys were not customer-friendly: They were absurdly long and structured with the company's interests and not the customer's in mind.

Today, those outdated methods are too slow and infrequent and don't go nearly deep enough to keep up with modern business pressures.

That's why companies today are turning to Voice of the Customer (VOC) solutions.

The Voice of the customer is a term used in business and Information Technology to describe the in-depth process of capturing a customer's expectations, preferences and aversions. Specifically, the Voice of the Customer is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives. Voice of the Customer studies typically consist of both qualitative and quantitative research steps. They are generally conducted at the start of any new product, process, or service design initiative in order to better understand the customer’s wants and needs, and as the key input for new product definition.

Much has been written about this process, and there are many possible ways to gather the information like focus groups, individual interviews, contextual inquiry, ethnographic techniques, etc. But all involve a series of structured in-depth interviews, which focus on the customers’ experiences with current products or alternatives within the category under consideration. Needs statements are then extracted, organized into a more usable hierarchy, and then prioritized by the customers.

It is critical that the product development core team own and are highly involved in this process. They must be the ones who take the lead in defining the topic, designing the sample, generating the questions for the discussion guide, either conducting or observing and analyzing the interviews, and extracting and processing the needs statements.

Voice of the Customer Initiatives

- A detailed understanding of the customer’s requirements

- A common language for the team going forward

- Key input for the setting of appropriate design specifications for the new product or service

- A highly useful springboard for product innovation.

Qualities of Desirable Voice of Customer Metrics

Credibility: How widely accepted is the measure? Does it have a good track record of results? Is it based on a scientifically and academically rigorous methodology? Will management trust it? Is there proof that it is tied to financial results?

Reliability: Is it a consistent standard that can be applied across the customer lifecycle and multiple channels?

Precision: Is it specific enough to provide insight? Does it use multiple related questions to deliver greater accuracy and insight?

Accuracy: Is the measurement right? Is it representative of the entire customer base, or just an outspoken minority? Do the questions capture self-reported importance or can they derive importance based on what customers say? Does it have an acceptable margin of error and realistic sample sizes?

Actionability: Does it provide any insight into what can be done to encourage customers to be loyal and to purchase? Does it prioritize improvements according to biggest impacts?

Ability to Predict: Can it project the future behaviors of the customer based on their satisfaction?

Understanding the needs of the customer