By Walter Rogers âAny customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.â People have been buying and selling since before recorded history, and during all that time, the sales process has rarely varied. Sellers have identified a profitable opportunity and pushed their product or solution to a likely customer, along the way doling out options and information only as needed and trying to control the process so that the customer was dependent on the sales person and the company for everything. However, the cumulative technological advances of the past 20 years â not the least of which is the way the entire business culture has been transformed by the Internet - has turned the tables; the customer is beginning to take charge and drive the sales conversation. The Internet supplies customers with immediate and highly detailed information about your companyâs products and services, along with information about all of your competitors. The advent of social media accelerates this process by giving buyers real-life and near-real-time reviews and opinions of your product and service. Now, rather than waiting for a sales person to approach them with something that they might find helpful, customers are proactively leveraging the Internet looking for the product or the company that appears best suited to meet their needs. In addition, these web-savvy customers prefer to do business online, using the tools, interfaces and amenities available through the Internet to do business their way, according to their schedule, to meet their specific needs. Because todayâs more sophisticated customers have a sense of power and entitlement, they are likely to be fully aware of the options and solutions available to them. They are no longer willing to settle for a product just because a sales professional says it is a good choice. Most customers these days arenât necessarily looking for products at all. What they are interested in finding is a specific outcome. (Most sales professionals think that customers are looking for solutions. They are wrong. Customers generally donât care what solution they get, as long as it delivers the outcome they need.) For this reason, sales professionals must stop thinking about simply pushing products or solutions. The way to close more business and drive more revenue today lies in first being sensitive to the customerâs needs and then adopting a flexible, creative approach to customizing products and solutions that will help customers achieve their desired outcome. Even in the most commoditized industries, highly successful sales professionals understand that when you can create options that are aligned with the customerâs needs and desired outcomes, you will differentiate yourself from a competitor who only sells widgets, and you will be able to sell on value and not price. For this reason, it is vitally important for sales professionals to refocus their efforts on exploring ideas and options with their customers that may be outside of the normal box. And all of this can only happen if the sales professional is creative in their thinking, curious about their customerâs business, and flexible in how they structure the product and solution mix to achieve the only thing that matters: the customerâs desired outcome. Where does creativity come from? Because creativity is such an important component in being able to work with customers to develop the outcomes they need, we need to stop and take just a moment to address it directly. Most of us would probably say that we are not particularly creative, because we donât write music or novels or create visual art. Creativity is so much bigger than that. Creativity really refers to the ability to generate something unique that didnât exist before, and you can apply that to literally any aspect of life. We were all born with the drive to be creative. When we were kids we were given a box of crayons and creativity flowed out of us in ways that were unique to us and which gave us joy. We asked lots of âwhyâ and âhowâ questions. We used our imaginations to bring life to toys and invisible friends. Eventually, though, that box of crayons was replaced with a geometry book and our creativity was replaced with rules and memorization and regurgitation. This âmemorize and regurgitateâ paradigm became the means to help us reach certain ends: pass tests, fit in with the system, meet acceptable standards, etc., but it came at a price; it suppressed our enthusiasm for creativity, because creativity didnât seem to fit in with the way the rest of the world functioned. This memorize and regurgitate process extends even into professional sales careers, as sales professionals are continuously exposed to product and service announcements, value propositions, and endless lists of features which are designed to be easily memorized and regurgitated. We quickly accept the proposition that in order to become successful sales professionals, we only need to thoroughly memorize all these items and then effectively regurgitate them to our customers in order to make a sale. However, as we have already pointed out, todayâs customers are much too sophisticated to have any patience at all with sales professionals who âshow up and throw up.â Instead, you must âcreate and collaborateâ to deliver the outcomes your customer is looking for. Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell Soup, has built a highly successful leadership philosophy around the following phrase: âYou canât talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.â In a nutshell, the point here is that there is no shortcut to success and no substitute for clear, comprehensive, creative behavior change. If you want to truly succeed in helping your customers achieve their outcomes in ways that differentiate you from everyone else, you must change your behavior: stop regurgitating pre-conceived solutions and start creating options that make sense to the customer. To accomplish this, you will need to dedicate yourself to re-building your creative muscle and apply it religiously in every customer interaction. Here is a specific list of actions you can take to re-build that muscle. Like anything else, you have to work at this consistently: Expand your horizons. Build enthusiasm. Associate and Communicate. Persevere. More than anything else, the suggestions above demand that you get out of the selling rut you have plowed for yourself and learn new ways of doing things. The late Senator Harold Hughes was fond of saying: âThe more you do what you always did, the more you will get what you always got.â If you are tired of getting what you have been getting, it is time to learn to do things differently. As you start freeing up your creative, collaborative side, you will be able to integrate that creativity with these six best practices to connect with customers in new, exciting ways: Action Items:
Chairman
Baker Communication
February 2011
Walter Rogers is the Chairman of Baker CommunicationsÂ
âAny customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black.â
This famous quote by Henry Ford reveals his strategy for mass producing the Model T automobile and launching the great industrial juggernaut of the early 20th century. For almost 100 years, this attitude also defined the baseline strategy of most sales organizations: âThe customer can have any product or service they want, as long as they let us tell them what they can have.â
People have been buying and selling since before recorded history, and during all that time, the sales process has rarely varied. Sellers have identified a profitable opportunity and pushed their product or solution to a likely customer, along the way doling out options and information only as needed and trying to control the process so that the customer was dependent on the sales person and the company for everything.
However, the cumulative technological advances of the past 20 years ?#147; not the least of which is the way the entire business culture has been transformed by the Internet - has turned the tables; the customer is beginning to take charge and drive the sales conversation. The Internet supplies customers with immediate and highly detailed information about your companyâs products and services, along with information about all of your competitors. The advent of social media accelerates this process by giving buyers real-life and near-real-time reviews and opinions of your product and service. Now, rather than waiting for a sales person to approach them with something that they might find helpful, customers are proactively leveraging the Internet looking for the product or the company that appears best suited to meet their needs. In addition, these web-savvy customers prefer to do business online, using the tools, interfaces and amenities available through the Internet to do business their way, according to their schedule, to meet their specific needs.
Because todayâs more sophisticated customers have a sense of power and entitlement, they are likely to be fully aware of the options and solutions available to them. They are no longer willing to settle for a product just because a sales professional says it is a good choice. Most customers these days arenât necessarily looking for products at all. What they are interested in finding is a specific outcome. (Most sales professionals think that customers are looking for solutions. They are wrong. Customers generally donât care what solution they get, as long as it delivers the outcome they need.) For this reason, sales professionals must stop thinking about simply pushing products or solutions. The way to close more business and drive more revenue today lies in first being sensitive to the customerâs needs and then adopting a flexible, creative approach to customizing products and solutions that will help customers achieve their desired outcome.
Even in the most commoditized industries, highly successful sales professionals understand that when you can create options that are aligned with the customerâs needs and desired outcomes, you will differentiate yourself from a competitor who only sells widgets, and you will be able to sell on value and not price. For this reason, it is vitally important for sales professionals to refocus their efforts on exploring ideas and options with their customers that may be outside of the normal box. And all of this can only happen if the sales professional is creative in their thinking, curious about their customerâs business, and flexible in how they structure the product and solution mix to achieve the only thing that matters: the customerâs desired outcome.
Where does creativity come from?
Because creativity is such an important component in being able to work with customers to develop the outcomes they need, we need to stop and take just a moment to address it directly. Most of us would probably say that we are not particularly creative, because we donât write music or novels or create visual art. Creativity is so much bigger than that. Creativity really refers to the ability to generate something unique that didnât exist before, and you can apply that to literally any aspect of life. We were all born with the drive to be creative. When we were kids we were given a box of crayons and creativity flowed out of us in ways that were unique to us and which gave us joy. We asked lots of âwhyâ and âhowâ questions. We used our imaginations to bring life to toys and invisible friends. Eventually, though, that box of crayons was replaced with a geometry book and our creativity was replaced with rules and memorization and regurgitation. This âmemorize and regurgitateâ paradigm became the means to help us reach certain ends: pass tests, fit in with the system, meet acceptable standards, etc., but it came at a price; it suppressed our enthusiasm for creativity, because creativity didnât seem to fit in with the way the rest of the world functioned.
This memorize and regurgitate process extends even into professional sales careers, as sales professionals are continuously exposed to product and service announcements, value propositions, and endless lists of features which are designed to be easily memorized and regurgitated. We quickly accept the proposition that in order to become successful sales professionals, we only need to thoroughly memorize all these items and then effectively regurgitate them to our customers in order to make a sale. However, as we have already pointed out, todayâs customers are much too sophisticated to have any patience at all with sales professionals who âshow up and throw up.â Instead, you must âcreate and collaborateâ to deliver the outcomes your customer is looking for.
Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell Soup, has built a highly successful leadership philosophy around the following phrase: âYou canât talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You have to behave your way out of it.â In a nutshell, the point here is that there is no shortcut to success and no substitute for clear, comprehensive, creative behavior change. If you want to truly succeed in helping your customers achieve their outcomes in ways that differentiate you from everyone else, you must change your behavior: stop regurgitating pre-conceived solutions and start creating options that make sense to the customer. To accomplish this, you will need to dedicate yourself to re-building your creative muscle and apply it religiously in every customer interaction.
Here is a specific list of actions you can take to re-build that muscle. Like anything else, you have to work at this consistently:
Expand your horizons.
Build enthusiasm.
Associate and Communicate.
Persevere.
More than anything else, the suggestions above demand that you get out of the selling rut you have plowed for yourself and learn new ways of doing things. The late Senator Harold Hughes was fond of saying: âThe more you do what you always did, the more you will get what you always got.â If you are tired of getting what you have been getting, it is time to learn to do things differently.
As you start freeing up your creative, collaborative side, you will be able to integrate that creativity with these six best practices to connect with customers in new, exciting ways:
Action Items:
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