Life Preserver or Speed Boat: Knowing Your Customer's Needs
Travis Newton
Global Account Executive @ Mindmatrix | Nurturing Clients for Success | Accelerating Partner Relationships | Mild Golf Addiction
In sales, knowing your market is one of the first steps you must take in understanding your customers needs and values. You can do this through research, attending webinars/seminars, and asking questions. However, with this article, I want to take it one step further by helping you see the importance of knowing the state of your specific customer within their market.
This topic is crucial now more than ever as the Covid-19 pandemic has affected almost every single business, both in positive and negative ways. As a sales person, you must be aware of how your customer is faring in their marketplace in order to meet the needs that will best suit their business at the current moment.
Is your prospective customer looking to survive or thrive?
The inspiration for this topic came from an interview with Dean Graziosi where he detailed the importance of knowing if your individual customer or market as a whole are in times of struggle or abundance.
To get a better understanding of your customers needs it is important to not only ask questions, but ask the right questions. Before I even get into my sales pitch, I make sure to ask questions that will help me gauge where their business is at and what pains they are facing in the current market. These are tough questions to ask, but they will help you get to the underlying goal that your customer is trying to achieve.
Some examples of the right questions to ask are:
- “How has your business fared throughout the pandemic?”
- “What have been your biggest pain points in adjusting to the current landscape?”
- “How much liquidity do you have to help solve the problems you are facing?”
These are very personal questions, but if you want to best help your customer, they are essential in understanding HOW you can help them. Through these questions, you can better tailor your pitch to help create value for your product or service based on the needs of the specific person you are speaking with.
Does your customer need a life preserver or a speed boat?
If the person you are speaking with expresses that their business is struggling and that they are having trouble standing out in their market, you must structure your pitch in a solution oriented way. How does your product help to solve the problems they are facing? What features of your product will help them stand out from the competition? What solutions can you offer that are critical to the survival of their business? By answering these questions, you help your customer see a way out of the hole they are in. You throw them a life jacket.
On the other hand, if the person you are speaking with expresses that their business is growing and doing extremely well, you structure your pitch with an advancement orientation. How can your product work to double or triple their profits? How will your product speed up growth? What features bolster efficiency and make the jobs of their employees easier? If you answer these questions correctly, you will help your customer to see how your product will advance their growth and build on the momentum they have already created. You will provide them with a speed boat.
It is important to understand that in both scenarios you can be selling the same exact product or service. However, by tailoring your pitch to the needs of that specific customer and orienting it to their current place in the market, you can help either side of the spectrum to see the value in what you are providing.