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Training | A New Type Of Sales Approach For A New Type Of Customer |
It is now a given fact in any sales-related seminar or conference you may attend that traditional sales methods are being relegated to the annals of history. The new, more discerning customers of today have seen to that. They now wield greater bargaining power, demand more value for money and have become more knowledgeable and professional when it comes to decision-making - this is precisely why we need a fresh approach.
The traditional customer call once seemed indispensable to the selling process; the time and expense involved were just a basic cost of doing business. In recent years, however, the business community has come to regard the sales call as an expenditure for which there are substitutes. For many companies telemarketing and direct mail have made the sales call a choice not an inevitability. This is not surprising when various studies suggest that getting one sales person in front of one customer now costs £500 - this cost has trebled since 1983. As a consequence professional salespeople have to be more effective than ever to justify the investment in a face to face effort.
In essence, we can draw seven primary conclusions and taken together, these findings paint a picture of the current state of the sales environment.
Customer Focus Creates Competitive Advantage:
- The one term that sets top performers apart - customer focus
- Outstanding sales results depend on:
- The ability to think from the customer's point of view
- Understanding the customer's agenda, buying cycle and best interests
- Beyond a superficial reading of immediate customer needs, salespeople
must gain a deeper understanding of both the buyer's long-term goals
and the overall business climate
- At the heart of customer focus is the art of listening constructively
- the best salespeople are masters at capturing information
- Customer focus means taking the customer seriously - to-day the salesperson
who clings to the product orientation of a decade ago is losing ground
- As client companies branch into new markets and unfamiliar territories,
they are demanding unique, flexible solutions from their vendors - customised
to support specific goals
- Another myth which can be exploded is that whilst customers value flexibility, being too flexible can undermine the sales relationship. On the whole salespeople imagine that customers value a vendor's responsiveness above all. However recent research shows that their primary concern is reliability.
In summary, in order to maintain customer focus the best salespeople become facilitators, creating a partnership that extends the selling relationship within the customer-s company. The motivation to achieve this should be strong - it costs five times as much to attract and sell to a new customer as it does to an existing one!
The right to do business has to be earned and never assumed:
Rather than doggedly asking for the business, the very best sales people work to keep the relationship moving towards a sale. They realise the need to identify how to turn their company's products into real solutions, which must meet specific needs.
Unfortunately, our surveys confirm that the average salesperson drags the customer over old ground as much as 52% of the time - they are unable to provide continuous stimulation and never know when to treat an existing customer like a new one.
Conversely, exceptional salespeople only make such 'return' calls for 10% of the time. Above all, earning the right to proceed requires gaining the customer's trust and top salespeople work diligently to establish a climate in which the customer is willing to share information and feels comfortable doing so. The key here is integrity.
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Coaching Champions: How to Get the Absolute Best Out of Your Salespeople
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