Put Yourself in Your Customers’ Shoes and Become a Better Salesperson
One of the best ways to improve your sales skills is to be a customer. I recently was a customer when we had to decide who to use to remodel our swimming pool.
What are your customers looking for?
Who do you think knows more about buying your product, you or your customers? It should be you. When you realize that your customers don't know as much as you do, then your sales process must include helping your customers make the best buying decisions and why.
For many products you are going to be the source of advice. Your customers just don't have all the knowledge that you do to make the best decisions. It’s overwhelming to ask them to decide on their own; your job is to simplify the buying decision.
How do you do that? Offer fewer choices. Giving customers a catalog and asking them to choose can be too overwhelming and too much work—that’s what one salesman did to me. Show your customers what other customers have chosen. Point out suggestions that will work for your customers and why you think they will work. This helps customers decide. The salesman who did that for me was the one who got my business.
Live up to basic expectations
Even if customers don’t know as much as you, they still have a basic idea of what they expect. The basics are that a salesman will do what he says. When a salesman says he will get back with a bid, you expect a bid to come.
You might ask when you can expect a bid. In my case, one of the salesmen never even submitted a bid. That’s despite an email and phone call from me letting him know if he emailed me something, I didn’t get it. He had a choice if he didn't want the job because he was too busy—he should have submitted a bid that was priced to be in the top tier of bids, but not so high to be ridiculous.
This pricing strategy would have made it harder for me to choose him when the start date for the project was so far off and because he was busy. It also would have protected him because I would never refer him to a neighbor if he had given me an outlandish bid. However, because he didn’t even submit a bid, I won’t give out his name at all.
I told another salesman that I didn’t receive his bid. He said he emailed it and would send it again—it took two days to send it! That struck me as odd. If he'd already emailed the bid, it would have taken him just a few clicks to quickly resend it. I could just imagine how difficult he would be to work with after the sale if I selected him.
Explain what happens after the sale
You don’t know what your customers' expectations will be after the sale; in fact, some of their expectations could be wrong. I had spoken with another neighbor who used a contractor that took three weeks to finish remodeling her pool. I had the same expectation for mine; I also wasn’t thrilled about a three-week project.
I asked the salesman what the timeline would be for the work that needed to be done; he explained that it would be seven days. Why? He had specialized crews for demolition, for resurfacing, and for finishing. Each crew would come and do their work because it would be all scheduled well in advance. Unlike other contractors, my teams would not be pulled off to work on another pool and then come back later in the week. I wanted the disruption to be as little and short as possible. This salesman explained the process, and it turned out to be better than I expected.
A management consultant told me that contractors are notorious for not following up after the first meeting. That may be true, but unfortunately, I see many of these sales deficiencies in industries other than just contracting.
