Your sales and marketing efforts will be more successful if you take a customer-centric selling approach.
What is customer-centric selling?
Simply put, customer-centric selling is selling with the customer in mind. Here are some tips to do this effectively:
What Customers Want
Your customers don’t care about what you want. They don’t care about your revenue goals, profit margins, or inventory problems. Customers care about their problems and what they want.
Always position your product or offering in terms of what the customer wants and how your product solves their problem.
The more you can use “you” and “your” instead of “our” and “we”, the better off you’ll be in your communications with customers.
What Customers Need
Help customers uncover their needs through probing questions. When you can draw out what the customer actually needs instead of just a stated want, you can better serve them and tailor your selling and offering accordingly.
Customer’s Language
Customers don’t speak your language. Your company-centric jargon and industry-speak is confusing to them.
Frame your selling in terms of what problems you are solving for the customer. Customer-centric selling avoids generic and useless language like “easy to use,” “simple,” “fast,” etc. These phrases mean nothing to customers.
This will require that you forget the acronyms and industry language you use everyday.
Customer’s Fears
Deep down inside, your customers have some fears. They are afraid of something. Your product may very well help alleviate those fears. Customer-centric selling means that you speak to those underlining concerns and fears and how your product makes those fears disappear.
Practice customer-centric selling and you’ll notice the difference. Your customers will be more willing to listen to you, buy from you, and refer their friends to your business.
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The more you can think like a customer, the better your sales will be. If you believe that the customer is below you, then you cannot possibly employ customer-centric selling. Realize that customers aren’t just variables that can be plugged into an equation, but rather need to be dealt with on an individual level. This article is spot-on with regards to how important customer-centric selling practices are.
@Ian – all businesses would do better if they returned to the good old days of personal, individual selling. Today we have the advantage of technologies that make that easier. It is too bad many companies don’t take advantage of the tools available to better approach customer centric selling.
Great piece! In order to really sell, you have to understand what customers need and/or want. Do this and only sell them what they are really after and success will follow. As this video (http://www.upyourservice.com/video-theater/how-do-you-build-and-sustain-a-superior-service-culture) points out, a superior service culture equals a winning business. This goes on the sales end, too!
@Tamara – Indeed: what is the customer really after? It may not be what they think or first mention when they walk in the door.