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
So it all comes down to this:
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?
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…
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:
So, creating customer focus in our selling approach by making our customers feel important comes down to:
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:
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,
