The key to successful sales is knowing what your client wants. Simon Harrop explains that the better prepared you are, the more likely a new customer will open up to you.
http://www.vimeo.com/8186287When I started in sales over twenty years ago, there was a big push for US style training programs that were all about forcing the meeting, pushing the features and benefits, and then trying to trick the customer into saying yes. After that you needed some clever objection-handling techniques so you could ‘crunch the deal’.
I felt pretty uncomfortable with this approach and did not use it. Instead I watched and listened to my colleagues, and noticed that some were getting lots of business while others struggled.
At first I didn’t know why, but I was fortunate in that I had a great sales manager. He showed me how important it was to understand a client and their market so you could talk their language. With hotels it was the language of occupancy and service; with restaurants it was covers, service and up-selling; and for manufacturers it was reducing production downtime while maintaining quality.
The light bulb glowed as I finally got it. Before you can find a solution, you have to understand your client, their business environment and what is important to them. Otherwise, whatever you have to offer might be either unnecessary or too expensive.
But how to do it? I started asking for copies of annual reports in client receptions and reading the industry magazines they had around. It took a little more effort but it paid off.
Personality, Persistence and Planning: The Harrop Three Ps
Most salespeople get into sales based the first two Ps: Their personality attracts them to the profession; and they are successful because they are persistent. But the best salespeople do something more.
In my experience, the top ten percent of salespeople are also excellent at the third P: planning. They plan their meetings so they are clear in advance about what they want to achieve. Part of this planning is researching the client and their market.
A client once told me their most hated question from a salesperson: ‘So how’s business?’ He expected, quite rightly, that the salesperson should know how their business is going. It’s the salesperson’s job to bring them something that they do not know, or add something valuable to their business.
Today we have some great tools to help us research. Technology gives us access to so much information about a client, and much of it can be accessed on the move thanks to smart phones and mobile devices. You can research using:
- your internal databases and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems;
- search engines such as Google or Bing;
- LinkedIn;
- Facebook;
- Twitter;
- clients’ websites;
- competitors’ websites; and
- industry websites and publications.
Using these tools, we can not only find out about the prospect company and the industry, we can also build a profile of our contact. This gives us a base to start a business relationship and help us truly understand our clients. Clients expect it – and they’ve probably looked you up as well.
Of course you need to be able to use this information along with great questions to understand the business problem, but that’s another challenge. Planning is the key: the better prepared you are, the more chance a customer will open up to you.
Back to our salesperson from earlier. It turned out that he hadn’t done any research on the prospective client apart from their name and address. Not even a quick look at the website. He had been given a lead and made assumptions about what the client needed, and thus missed an opportunity to do business.
Since then he’s started doing research, and now he gets much better results.
Simon Harrop is the Chief Executive of Straight Ahead Sales. Among many other companies, he has worked with Vodafone, Ericsson and Telstra, and he currently sits on the NSW Business Chamber council. He has been mentoring students in the UTS: Business mentoring program since 2005.
