Customers don’t want to spend time answering questions salespeople ask to identify their major problems. They are more impressed with salespeople who are already aware of their problems and can offer valuable insights on how to improve their business.
Teaching guidelines
Here are four guidelines to help teach prospects and customers:
- Lead to your unique strength. Try to lead the customer directly to strengths your competitors can’t offer. Try to produce information that educates the customers about primary problems companies similar to theirs face.
- Challenge customer assumptions. Try to reframe the customers’ thinking to areas they never considered before. Once you lay out the key issues, provide a fresh perspective that makes customers think differently about the information you’re unfolded.
- Catalyze action. Organize your return-on-investment calculations to focus on the money the customer wastes by not taking action. Supply as much information as possible showing how the customer is losing money because he or she isn’t changing how their business operates. Try to build the customers’ sense of urgency about fixing the problem.
- Provide emotional impact. Use a story to tie the customer to the examples you’re furnishing. Focus your presentation not on your product or service but on the reason the customer would benefit from your solution.
Adapted from: The Effortless Experience, by Matthew Dixon and Nick Toman. Dixon is an executive director and Toman is a senior director of research for CEB.
