If you don’t know your customers, you’re not doing your job.
As salespeople, it’s our job to ensure customers get the correct solutions for their business challenges—so that they keep buying from us and referring us to other great clients. But in order to serve our clients properly, we must actually get to know them—not just their demographics and how they spend money online, but what they actually want and need from us.
Straight Talk
Great salespeople know how to uncover the core issues plaguing clients so we can make the best possible recommendations based on our knowledge and experience. We’re not “yes men.” Clients want our points of view. They want to learn best practices, and they want to hear what doesn’t work.
The key to delivering the ROI that keeps people coming back for more is actually talking to our customers—not through email or text, and not through marketing automation. We must have real conversations.
Simplify Your Sales Conversation
That’s why I love “Three Big Myths That Keep You From Being Customer-Centric,” a CMS Wire article by marketing guru Christine Crandell. She writes:
Everyone, it seems, has jumped on the customer [insert favorite objective here] bandwagon. Articles, studies and best practices abound, each heralding the financial benefits of aligning your organization outward to how customers go about their daily lives … If the customer is the lynchpin of survival, why aren’t more companies doing something about it?
The myths and anecdotes Christine shares are practical and an immediate call to action for salespeople—urging us to get real, ditch the jargon, and un-complicate our approach to customers.
Read the rest of the article and find out how to simplify and strengthen your sales approach. Plus, for more on how to build valuable relationships with your clients, check out my latest book, Pick Up the Damn Phone!: How People, Not Technology, Seal the Deal.
Comment Here
How often do you actually talk to your current clients and prospects? What results do you get from these conversations, versus digital communication?
Excellent article, I feel this is the trap a lot of business’s fall into, they don’t understand the needs of there client or customer. We always make sure with our clients, to find out what we can do for there service to improve there ROI, not the other way round. Thanks for sharing.