Customer Centered Selling

The success of a business or a sales career depends on your ability to get customers, and then hold them over the long haul. In today’s competitive business market, a good customer base is very difficult and expensive to cultivate, but it is difference between success and failure.

In fact, a list of satisfied customers can be the single-most valuable asset a company can acquire during its lifetime. For you and your company to be successful you must be able to attract, acquire and keep customers indefinitely.

Within the context of creating and keeping customers, what, then, is the job of the salesperson? The answer to this is simple. The job of the salesperson is to prospect, present and follow-up. Your sales success will be directly proportional to the quality and quantity of work that you do in these three areas.

There are three types of customer-centered selling and they are all combined and somewhat similar. They are relationship selling, partnering for profit, and consultative selling. They are all ways to differentiate yourself from anyone else who is attempting to sell the same product or service. They are all ways to keep customers, once you have them, and sell to them again and again over the years.

Relationship selling is the core of modern selling strategies. It is the key to your long-term success. Relationship selling requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the selling process as they are experienced by your customer.

Relationship selling comes into play whenever your customer needs to rely on your advice and support to get the full benefit of what he or she buys. Most sales today are complex sales. That is, they are multi-call sales, requiring several calls to the customer or several visits to his or her business before the customer is in a position to make an intelligent buying decision.

A multi-call sale is highly dependent on the customer building up a higher and higher level of trust and confidence in you as a salesperson. Until the customer reaches “critical mass” in his or her feelings toward you and your company, the customer is incapable of making a buying decision. This is perhaps the most important key to remember about customer-centered selling.

The relationship becomes more important than the product or service. It comes first. It must be established clearly before you can go on. It is, in fact the key differentiation between you and your competitors. In many cases, the quality of your relationship with the customer is the competitive advantage that enables you to edge out others who may have products and services similar to yours or are selling at lower prices.

The single biggest mistake that causes salespeople and companies to lose customers is taking the customer for granted. This is called “customer entropy.” It is when the salesperson begins to ignore the customer. Sales studies show that on average 70 percent of customers who walked away from their existing suppliers later said that the primary reason they changed was due to a lack of attention from the company.

Once you have invested the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality, trust-based relationship with your customer, you must maintain that relationship for the life of your business and you can never take it for granted.

The second type of customer-centered selling is called the partnering approach. When you deal with a business person, you can be sure of one thing: that person thinks about his or her business day and night. It is very close to him or her. It is always dear to his or her heart.

You should always be looking to help and advise your customer on ways to cut costs and improve results in his or her area of responsibility. You should look for ways to help your customer in non-business areas as well. You should position yourself as one who cares about the success of your customer more than anyone else, and even more than you care about selling your product or service.

There is a principle of reciprocity in business that is extremely powerful. It simply says that, “If you do something nice for someone else, they will feel obligated to do something nice for you.”

You should always be looking for opportunities to go the extra mile, to do more than you are paid for, to put in more than you take out. By extending yourself, you improve your positioning in the customer’s mind and increasingly differentiate yourself and your company from your competitors who are after the same business.

The third type of customer-centered selling is the consulting approach or otherwise known as consultative selling. When you position yourself as a consultant, you are really positioning to serve your customer as a problem solver. Instead of trying to sell something to your customer, you concentrate all your efforts and attention on helping your customer solve his or her problems, achieve his or her goals, or satisfy his or her needs.

Many salespeople and companies today make the mistake of thinking the reason people buy is primarily on the basis of price. This is simply not true. Consumer buying studies have shown that on average 94 percent of all purchases are non-price sales.

When consumers are interviewed after they have made a purchase as to what caused them to buy, the reasons they most often give are: the reputation of the company, the level of service and support that the company offers, the reliability of the company, and the responsiveness of the organization to their complaints. Price invariably comes in near or at the bottom.

The key to keeping customers is satisfaction. Total quality management has been defined as, “Finding out what the customer wants and then giving it to him or her.” There is no mystery to it. The reason companies lose customers is because they have failed to identify exactly why it is that the customers buy in the first place. Then, they have failed to continue giving to the customer for the duration of their relationship.

A customer can be the most valuable single asset that a company has. Giving committed service to your customers, in such a way that you keep them for life, is one of the smartest and most profitable things that you could ever do. When you do this, your future success in selling and in business are assured.

Copyright©2007 by Joe Love and JLM & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide.

Article Source: http://www.content.onlypunjab.com

Joe Love draws on his 25 years of experience helping both individuals and companies build their businesses, increase profits, and success coaching programs. He is the founder and CEO of JLM & Associates, a consulting and training organization, specializing in career coach training. Through his seminars and lectures, Joe Love addresses thousands of men and women each year, including the executives and staffs of many businesses around the world, on the subjects of leadership, achievement, goals, strategic business planning, and marketing. Joe is the author of three books, Starting Your Own Business, Finding Your Purpose In Life, and The Guerrilla Marketing Workbook.

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