Many sales people are used to calling customers either in response to a specific need, or about a marketing initiative and pitching a new program. It’s a great opportunity to just talk to a customer and learn from them. Yet many ask questions like “What do I talk to them about” or “What should I be presenting” – Dave Brock gives the answer.
Probing our customers, understanding their problems, quantifying and qualifying their needs is critical to proposing solutions to their issues. Customers appreciate sales professionals who provide value based and business justified solutions to their problems.
But what happens when the customer doesn’t know that they have problems, or doesn’t recognize opportunities? What happens when they don’t know? No amount of good sales questioning and probing will get the customer to know what they don’t know.
We all know the role of sales professionals is changing. The sales person used to be an important channel to educating and informing customers about products and services. The wide availability of information on the internet changes this–though it doesn’t eliminate this. Most customers are more informed about products and services. They do their homework, searching the internet, leveraging the opinions of others to select a few alternatives they will consider. What does this mean for sales professionals and their evolving role?
Visit enough social networking sites, LinkedIn questions, and sales forums, and you will see questions like this: “What’s a killer question to ask a customer?” or “What’s a killer value proposition that will win?” or “What’s a killer close?” Someone is always looking for the “killer” approach, as if you can answer that independent of the
If anything, one of the greatest lessons we can learn from the crises created by the economy is not to be lulled into a false sense of security. Everything we do with our customers must create value–each meeting and every solution. If we cannot create value, we waste both their time and resources.
You know this story, I’m sitting at my desk, the phone rings, I answer, and an enthusiastic voice: “Good morning Dave!, I’m Roger from XXX…..” The pitch begins. I barely had the words, “tell me what you do” out of my mouth when the script started.
A good friend and I were having an interesting conversation this morning. One of his regional VP’s was having great difficulty with one of the organization’s top sales people who refused to update the CRD system. What would you do? Would you fire the the sales person?
Many people make a mistake when they think about sales. Some think it is all about the product, many think it is about the relationship but he best sales people I have met are really great thinkers.
I have a confession, I grew up selling high tech systems, software and complex solutions. I spent much of my career in selling very complex capital equipment. For years, I had an arrogance that real sales people sold these solutions, everything else was order taking.
A number of years ago, several companies having commoditized products managed to overlook my arrogance and asked me to help improve their sales processes. I think may have gotten more from them than they may have gotten from me.
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