The Customer Bill of Rights

Customers are changing their behavior in ways that may dictate a different view of selling and a revised role for salespeople and your company.

Here’s the latest list of 25 customer expectations. Some of them may conflict with traditional selling beliefs:

1. We don’t want to feel manipulated.
2. We don’t want salespeople to try to be our friends.
3. We don’t want to be pressured to buy.
4. We don’t want to feel that we’ve been sold. We want to be able to buy.
5. We want to talk about our needs before being subjected to product pitches.
6. We want salespeople to help us get what we want.
7. We don’t want sellers stalking us.
8. We don’t want to be subjected to early or multiple trial closes.
9. We want salespeople to be honest about what their offers can and can’t do.
10. We want our objections to be heard and considered before salespeople try to talk us out of them.
11. We don’t mind salespeople saying, “I don’t know, but I’ll check and get back to you.”
12. We don’t want salespeople using terms that we don’t fully understand.
13. We want salespeople to learn about our current procedures, then offer only products or services that match the capabilities that we need in order to improve our business results.
14. We want to be empowered to achieve our goals or solve our problems.
15. We want salespeople to have clear objectives and state them early in sales calls.
16. We want salespeople to provide facts about their companies rather than hype.
17. We want salespeople to be able to tell us in a few sentences what it is that their companies do.
18. We want to have salespeople help us track actual results relative to expectations.
19. We don’t want to hear any more opinions on what salespeople believe the value of their offering would be to us.
20. We’d like cost versus benefits based upon our projections, not the salesperson’s.
21. We’d like salespeople to understand and align with our buying processes.
22. We don’t want to have to wait until the end of the month to get a fair price.
23. We don’t want to hear opinions from salespeople not based on facts.
24. We want to do business with salespeople and companies that keep their commitments.
25. We want salespeople to respect the research we’ve done by treating us as being knowledgeable.

Adapted from Rethinking the Sales Cycle (McGraw Hill) by John Holland and Tim Young. Mr. Holland is cofounder of CustomerCentric Systems. Mr. Young is CEO of CustomerCentric Systems  (www.customercentric.com)