Selling is about helping others and meeting customer needs. A good sales person needs to be many things, including focused, organized, and gregarious. Most importantly, however, you must be mindful of meeting your customers’ needs. As a sales professional, you are in a position to help people buy solutions.
Your customer’s best interest
Here are four practical ways to sell with your customer’s best interest in mind.
- Be professional – There’s a big difference between someone who sells and a sales professional. The former pushes product. The latter focuses on identifying what is behind the customer’s need and matches that to a solution. The need can be driven by pain, or gain, or both. Pain is related to solving an immediate problem. Gain is centered on buying for value. While the two needs are sometimes interrelated, they are solved quite differently.
- Act on a commitment – Deliver on the need. The best salespeople are effective, confident, and thoroughly familiar with their client’s business. They know how, when, where, and why to deliver the product and service purchased.
- Provide continued support – The customer is looking for a salesperson who is both a counselor and a consultant. The best in class salesperson is a creative, strategic thinker who can anticipate the customer’s ongoing concerns, goals, and objectives.
- Develop long-term loyalty –The formation of lasting customer relationships based on honesty, integrity, and trust reap the greatest rewards. James Duffy, author of More Than Account, says that 8% of sales people capture 80% of the sales. That 8% have strong customer relationships.
Care and commitment to meet customer needs
Today, a purchase can be made with the click of an online button, no sales person involved. Your best defense to this is building and sustaining good in-person customer relationships (see building-a-business-relationship). Buyers want to know the seller cares, especially in larger deals, and online platforms cannot provide that. Help meeting customer needs ensures that customer makes the best decision and receives the greatest return on their investment. This is the sales professional’s greatest tool.
Get tips and tricks like the above in The Art of Sales books. Or subscribe to the FREE monthly articles here.