Sell More with Customer Focus: 5 Action Steps
We’ve been talking about just how personal selling can become and reminding ourselves how unique our customers are. We’ve talked about customer needs and demands … and our need to connect and communicate with our customers on their terms.
We’ll wrap up customer focus with 5 action steps that show you’re committed to and focused on your customer. Add all 5 to your sales skills toolkit and you’re sure to sell more.
5 ACTION STEPS
- The best way to start is to jump in and just do it! What’s “it”? It’s whatever the customer needs, demands or wants at any given time.
- Next, do it right. What’s right? It’s reacting with the correct action for the customer situation you’re in…and every situation will be different. We need to be alert to pick up on customer clues and flexible enough to react to them.
- Then, do it quickly. How quickly? Once again, your reaction matches your customer’s demand for speed…and it will vary from customer to customer.
- Do it better. Go beyond what your customer expects and you’ll be way ahead of your competition.
- Finally, do it every time. It’s always easy to do it once. Being focused on your customer means doing it consistently…and that means doing it again and again and again.
So it all comes down to this:
- Take action to build your customer focus and sell more.
This wraps up our customer focus blogs of the last few weeks. During that time, we’ve discussed 4 key components of a positive customer focus:
So how are you putting customer focus to work in your selling activity?
Last time, we talked about making our customers feel important to stay customer focused. That’s key to selling more, but not always enough. We also need to respond to customers’ needs and demands.
Customers’ needs?
Our task is to identify the individual needs of each customer and not to make assumptions ahead of time. We know customers have both personal needs and needs that relate to what we’re selling. We know needs will vary from one customer to another.
Identifying needs becomes part of our discovery process. We uncover needs by getting our customers to supply us with information. The quality of the information improves dramatically based on our ability to engage our customers, question them effectively and [infopopup:listenactively].
Identifying customer needs is just part of responding positively to our customers. We need to respond to their demands as well.
Customer demands?
- Customers want higher quality service – faster – with better follow-up. Amazon has set a whole new standard to meet.
- Customers are demanding more value – and they have the digital tools to search for it until they find it.
- Customers are demanding higher levels of knowledge and performance from us.
The Internet with its volume of information and competitive data means our customers come to us with more information and knowledge about the products and services they’re looking for. And they’re using this knowledge to their advantage when negotiating and making the decision to buy.
So how does all this relate to selling more?
It means we need a whole new level of customer focus if we want to sell more. The more focused we are on really getting to know our customers and becoming their trusted advisers, the better we can meet their needs and demands.
The result is simple. When we develop this whole new level of customer focus, our customers will look to us – and not our competitors – for what they need.
Next time, we’ll look at how we combine our customer focused approach with the right customer focused actions to sell more.
Until then,
Finding common areas of interest is one way we discussed to keep our selling approach customer focused. Another is making our customers feel important.
Like all of us, our customers want to feel important. Making them feel important means showing them what they say and do is important to us.
We know how to do this…
- We treat customers as people first and buyers second.
- We make them feel comfortable with us as people.
- We pay close attention to the information customers share with us.
- We work to react to their concerns and their questions.
- We stay connected and follow up.
Doing all this shows our customers they can trust us and what we’re selling…and building trust is key.
Our customers need still more from us.
They want:
- speed in everything we do for them.
- their needs met now!
- to be dealt with efficiently.
- us to respect their time.
- the whole selling process – and the way we manage it – to be easy, simple…and fast!
So, creating customer focus in our selling approach by making our customers feel important comes down to:
- building a positive connection with each customer on his/her terms.
- making customers feel important and comfortable with us.
- building a level of trust with each customer.
- respecting customers’ time by responding quickly.
And the take away from doing all this?
We automatically get – and keep – more customers, increasing our ability to sell more.
Our next look at selling more with customer focus deals with customer demands and expectations in a world of rapid change.
Until then,
Have you noticed that selling needs to be a whole lot more customer focused these days? The personal side of selling and customer focus are so important now that my next series of blogs is all about ways we can improve our “customer focus”.
Sure, products and features are important, but they need to be combined with a strong customer focus to get you a winning formula for results. Today it really is all about your customer!
So where do we start with customer focus?
Well, we all know each of our customers is unique, that customers’ needs and expectations vary widely. Because of this uniqueness, each customer presents a different selling challenge for us. To meet the challenge, our goal should be to personalize our product approach and message to each customer. To do this, we’ll need to get to know our customers as people first so we can relate to them easily and quickly.
How do we do this?
Looking for common areas of interest is a great start to connecting with your customers on a more personal level:
- How do they spend their free time?
- What about family?
- Where do they vacation?
- What do they do for fun?
- What do they read?
Answers to these questions and others give valuable clues for keeping your selling interactions focused on your customer first before moving to products and features.
Next time, more ways you can keep your selling interactions customer focused.
Until then,
To close more deals, I’ve developed a Sell Alphabet. It’s a reminder to stay customer focused in every selling situation.
My Sell Alphabet is based on the 7 letters in “people”. It highlights my core beliefs about selling and selling people.
P comes first because people and selling people is the key. Selling people first, integrated with your sales process, drives sales and closes deals … every time.
Engage your prospects and customers on their terms. They’ve usually done their own research by the time they get to you. Use that to engage them through questioning so you can start where they are. Once you’ve discovered what they’ve learned and what they’re after, you can:
- personalize your selling approach
- provide any missing information
- clarify any confusion and…
- really focus on what they want.
Opportunity. Selling people first is your opportunity to get to know your customers on a human level so you can build positive relationships with them. When you understand your customers personally, you gain their trust. Once they trust you, they become much more willing to make a positive buying decision.
Personal sales skills. The more highly developed yours are, the greater your selling success. Work to improve them every day. With solid personal sales skills, you avoid becoming a “data miner” focused only on numbers. Keeping the personal touch gets you deals … and makes all your selling activity even more rewarding.
Learning. Every day is a learning day in selling. Make learning one of your top priorities. There’s lots to learn …
- more about your target market and ideal customer
- customer wants, opportunities and needs in your market
- buyer behaviors and decision making processes.
Best of all, learning more and more about selling, your market and your customers, helps you refine and improve your personal sales process. With an improved sales process, you’ll close more deals.
Expertise, the natural outcome of Learning, begins with mastering your personal selling skills. Applying them with a customer focused strategy and sales process leads to your personal sales success … and helps you get more deals faster.
So what Sell Alphabet are you using to close more deals?
SEE HOW TO CLOSE MORE DEALS
It’s the holiday season. It’s the time of year when we look forward to celebrating the season and connecting with family, friends and all those who are important to us. Strangely, we seem to pack all this connecting activity into a 3 or 4 week period…then, put it all away until the same time next year.
As I skimmed through the endless emails in my inbox, I got to thinking that too often our business and supplier relationships seem to follow the same pattern. We flood our networks with emails, special offers, warm wishes, seasonal jokes or heart warming stories in December…then abruptly stop when the new year begins.
Why?
What if we changed our way of thinking and operating to embrace a “full year concept” of reaching out, connecting and relationship building in both our personal and business networks?
I don’t mean using LinkedIn updates, Facebook posts or any other social media automated connection tools.
I mean real live, personal, individualized reaching out…writing a personal note or email, making a phone call, forwarding an interesting article to someone who could use it, commenting on events in the contact’s business or personal life…some kind of personalized, one-on-one reach out.
Strikes me the tangible and intangible benefits to adopting this full year concept are gifts that keep on giving. Ongoing personalized activity with those in our networks creates more meaningful connections, and builds mutual satisfaction and enjoyment. Even better, it creates trust, the key to relationship building…and selling success.
When we interact with our networks on a full year, personal basis, we really get in sync with them: their needs, their likes, their dislikes, their issues and challenges. Knowing all this means we’ll be able to identify and react to opportunities when they arise.
So the tangible benefit to us is the reward of expanded opportunities and increased sales. The intangible benefit is earning personal relationships that are both trusting and long-lasting…and isn’t that our primary objective as sales professionals?
Until the next time, all the best for an enjoyable and happy holiday season,
We’re all looking for ways to sell more. Here’s my solution: put people first!
So why is the people factor so important if we want to sell more?
Well, when we sell people first, selling can be a whole lot more fun so we’ll sell more.
- People, their personalities, behaviors, actions and reactions add variety and challenge to our selling process.
- Working with people is one of the reasons we get excited about what we do!
- It’s why most of us got into selling in the first place.
When we focus on people, we make our selling task easier and more efficient so we’ll sell more.
- we get commitments faster because we’ve taken the time to really get to know the people we’re selling.
- so, the next time we interact with them, we don’t have to start all over again.
- we’re already part way there … they’re comfortable with us, they trust us and they’re ready to buy from us.
If we develop this “people first” approach, we build relationships and common ground for doing business now and over time. Result? We sell more!
- these long term relationships are what help us produce positive results down the road
- … and that’s what we’re here to do!
So how do we make sure we’re putting people first so we will sell more? Try this …
Switch roles mentally and start thinking like buyers.
When we’re buyers and we’re looking for products or services important to us, don’t we want sales people who first get to know us and engage us as people? Who find out what we want or need; then, provide it … instead of focusing only on what they want to sell us?
When we switch roles, it becomes easy to see our buyers as people just like us … and that puts selling people first. Best of all, when we do, we’ll sell better – and a whole lot more.
Let me know how this works for you!
For me, selling is all about selling people.
Harvey Mackay has been a huge influence on my approach to selling because he’s a master of 2 concepts:
- selling people
- building customer relationships.
We sales people know that, no matter what process and software we’re using, we are the key to getting the sales task accomplished.
The best part?
We’re selling our products and services to people…and it’s people who make the buying decisions.
So …
- we want to sell people first, before selling our products and services.
- to sell people, we need to get to know them better so we can engage them personally.
Here are my 3 favorite tips to do just that. They’re quick reminders on sharpening our personal selling game.
TIP #1: People buy from people, especially people who make themselves “easy to buy from”.
- yes, as we talked about earlier, there’s a huge emphasis today on selling process … CRM, Data and Analytics. I’m not putting any of these down; they’re practical and required.
- BUT, in what we do as sales people, process and software alone don’t sell products and services, WE DO!
TIP #2: People want to do business with people who understand them and what they want.
- even when they’ve done their own research, people will want to use us as “sales advisers”.
- how can we become knowledgeable sales advisers?
- we work to learn and understand the personal profiles of our customers – their needs, requirements, attitudes, likes and dislikes .
- when we learn as much as we can about our customers and what they want, we’ll get their commitments a whole lot faster.
This next tip says it all…
TIP #3: People want to do business with people they like, respect and trust.
- these personal qualities are often hard to find today.
- our real challenge as sales people is to differentiate ourselves from all those lacking these qualities.
- we do it by being trusted and respected advisers in all our selling activity.
Next time, I’ll talk about the big payoff from putting these 3 people tips into action.
For more, check out a summary of Harvey Mackay’s The MacKay MBA of Selling in the Real World.
The other day, I caught some media coverage of the upcoming Olympics in Rio. As I watched Olympians preparing for their events, it struck me that high performance athletes have a lot in common with high performance salespeople. Both drive themselves relentlessly to win rewards and recognition through competitive performance in their individual fields. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that gold medalists, whether in sales or in the Olympics, consistently use 5 winning ways to maximize their performance.
Winning Way #1 – Preparing Yourself
Gold medal athletes spend years practicing and preparing for their events. Gold medal salespeople do the same. They prepare themselves with deep knowledge of what they are selling and, equally importantly, who they are selling. They practice their skills to prepare for every sales interaction; they watch selling videos, participate in LinkedIn sales groups, network personally, constantly read sales books and articles on selling…ongoing actions that prepare them to sell competitively.
Winning Way #2 – Knowing the Field
High performance athletes have to know their field. They study their event and their competition to learn all they can about what to expect on event day and, as a result, how to win. Salespeople striving to be gold medalists also have to know their field. They work to find answers for market knowledge questions like:
- Who are my competitors?
- What are their advantages?
- Where are they vulnerable?
- What will it take to outperform them and win?
Winning Way #3 – Believing in Yourself
Athletes and salespeople striving for gold start with a strong belief in themselves.
They have a healthy level of confidence in their skills and abilities. They have learned to use mind control to conquer doubts and fears when they arise during competition. Gold medalists focus instead on believing that their preparation, knowledge and skill will ensure a win.
Winning Way #4 – Exceeding Personal Expectations
Gold medal athletes and salespeople are never satisfied with their performance. They set aggressive performance goals for themselves. They work constantly to meet their goals…and then, to better them. Achieving a “personal best” always means resetting it; then working hard to overachieve the new goal.
This constant striving to improve results in ever better performance for both gold medal athletes and salespeople. It produces endless positive outcomes: increased reward – gold medals or higher earnings – personal satisfaction and recognition, and building their Olympic or sales careers.
Winning Way #5 – Going for it All
Winning gold, at the Olympics or in sales, means going for it all and doing all that needs to be done to win.
No obstacles stand in the way of athletes or salespeople going for gold. They either plow through the obstacles – regardless of personal sacrifices, injuries or disappointments – or work to find a way around them. They’re determined and resilient, as Brazilian soccer player Marta Vieira da Silva explains in her LinkedIn Pulse post. When loss or defeat does occur, the high performance athlete and salesperson get right back in the game and continue to compete!
So how are you using these winning ways to sell more?
The Challenge Story is all about how we developed our online sell more learning product. It was originally posted on eLearning Brothers’ blog. eLearning Brothers is one of the key suppliers for Go for the Green Selling Challenge.
How It All Started
Our mission was to create a fun new way to help salespeople sell more. We planned to use key selling concepts from our Power Selling seminar series and make them accessible online to expand our market reach.
But…how to do it?
Our Product Vision
Well, most salespeople love golf. It’s competitive, fun and it challenges their personal skill. What’s more, both selling and golf require preparation, planning and practice to maximize personal performance. So why not create an online product with a golf theme to help salespeople sell more?
A golf themed product would be fun and a cool way to help salespeople sharpen the selling skills they need to sell more!
We could call the product “Go for the Green Selling Challenge”. We could make it a forum where selling skills are refreshed and practiced; then, played and scored, all in a virtual golf setting. It would help anyone sell more…learn selling skills, practice selling skills, score selling skills…and have fun doing it.
So…
We started the lengthy product development process to link selling skills with golf. First came skills learning, Practice.
We developed and story boarded 9 key selling skills compared to 9 holes of golf.
With Practice in progress, we moved on to Play.
Oops!
…a major hang-up in our development process.
How to develop Play for skills testing? We needed a golf game for a fun way to test skills learned in Practice. We knew there had to be a solution online…some kind of golf game template where we could plug in our Play quizzes and do some customizing to fit our Practice content.
Our search found several golf site templates, golf scoring templates and, finally, eLearning Brothers’ Golf Challenge game template.
We worked our way through their template demo. It looked perfect:
- it was built around a 9 hole course, an exact fit for our 9 sales skills
- the graphics were fun and colorful
- it was 100% customizable, and
- it could be uploaded to our site to create the Play component we were after!
Next
We soon discovered the template was just the beginning.
eLearning Brothers’ custom development team offered responsive support way beyond our expectations. Their knowledge, experience and support allowed us to build Play to fit our product vision exactly.
Later in development, when users wanted more Play quizzes, they came up with a creative way to expand the golf template’s functionality and give our users what they were looking for. The Brothers sure made us look good!
Their golf game template became an integral part of our first Go for the Green Selling Challenge product. We also used the template’s graphics on our site and throughout Practice to integrate it visually with Play.
Every day we work with Go for the Green Selling Challenge and our site, we realize how lucky we were to find eLearning Brothers and their golf game template. Their awesome team and their template made it possible for us to realize our product vision and take our whole new concept live.
Thanks eLearning Brothers! We couldn’t have done it without you.
