The customer experience continues to be an incredibly hot topic, largely driven by companies like Apple, who are relentlessly focused on providing customers with a great experience from start to finish. For companies with a sales team, delivering an exceptional customer experience really begins with the interactions buyers have with your salespeople.
Is Sales Serving the Customer?
Much of what has been written about sales effectiveness is focused on meeting the seller’s needs – helping them convince more people to buy their solutions. Please don’t get me wrong; many sales training programs stress the importance of understanding the customers and meeting their needs. But close examination finds that these approaches focus more on the seller winning a deal than on the buyer making a great decision.
So, let’s step back from our desired outcome – getting a sale – for a moment. What does a remarkable experience look like from the buyer’s perspective? When we consider our sales interactions in this light, we get a clear picture of three things our model must deliver to all prospects and customers to provide an exceptional customer experience.
Solve Their First Problem First
Too often, salespeople focus on figuring out how their products and services will solve customers’ problems and/or help them achieve objectives. On the surface, this seems appropriate and may become the right approach at some point in the process. However, every seller on your team must understand that any prospect or customer meeting with them has a problem that takes precedence over your products and services. As discussed in our blog, Solving The One Problem All Buyers Have, these buyers are struggling to figure out what is best for them. If they cannot get comfortable with their decision, they won’t be comfortable with our solution either.
Therefore, the primary service salespeople can and should provide is meaningful, expert decision-making assistance. This means salespeople must become experts at evaluating solutions and making informed business decisions — not just presentation skills, negotiating tactics, or closing techniques.
Teach Them Something They Don’t Already Know
Another part of providing buyers with an exceptional experience is providing them with meaningful insights. Unfortunately, this is sometimes interpreted to mean that salespeople should try to tell buyers things about the buyer’s business they don’t already know. Now, perhaps you are one of the very few companies with the research staff and intelligence resources to arm salespeople with insights their buyers don’t have. But for most companies, this isn’t realistic.
What IS realistic for virtually all companies is providing buyers with insights into your domain – the area where your company lives and breathes every day. For a technology company, this might mean sharing insights about tech trends your buyers may not be aware of and how those trends might impact the buyer’s business. For a financial services company, it might mean providing research about trends in risk management. The key here is that you are providing the buyer with insights that are truly meaningful – information that could affect how they think about the future and evaluate your solution.
Move At the Buyer’s Pace
The third thing our methodology must do is ensure that the buyer is always comfortable with where they are in the purchase process. Many salespeople are laser-focused on moving the deal through their sales pipeline, without giving much thought to where the buyer is in their purchase journey. The result is a buyer who feels pressured and a salesperson who never understands why they’re always moving one step forward and two steps back.
By focusing on ensuring the buyer is always comfortable with the next step and only advancing when they’re ready, salespeople ensure a smooth buyer experience and build the kind of trust that makes buyers more likely to choose your solutions.
Great Salespeople Provide Great Customer Experiences
All companies want to provide an exceptional customer experience, but many of them don’t start the right place. If you have a sales team, the customer experience begins the moment your salesperson meets a prospect. Companies that provide their salespeople with a model that consistently helps them help buyers make better, more informed decisions will almost always provide exceptional customer experiences – and will SELL MORE as a result.
Want to learn more? Axiom provides a unique alternative to traditional sales training. Unlike traditional sales training events, we embed our methodology into your sales cadence, delivering dramatically better sales results. To learn more about our Mindful Selling Methodology, Kinetics Sales Effectiveness Platform, or our unique, guaranteed approach, please visit us at www.axiomsaleskinetics.com.