Often selling is considered as a formal way of pitching and persuading someone to buy your product or services. It’s seen as a one-way approach. However, that’s not true. Selling can take many forms and can take different kinds of solutions.
For example, you need to take a cold-call approach in addition to straightforward sales styles or a warm sales approach with a more friendly and casual tone. The type of sales approach is taken depends upon who you are selling to or what the prospects want.
While taking the customer-focused selling approach all the selling method you chose to follow is taken in the interest of your customers, keeping their likes, dislikes, needs, and wants in mind.
Customer-focused selling is defined as a selling method that focuses on building a real connection with the customers. Before calling the prospects, sales reps learn more about them, figure out their needs or help them to identify one. Rather than offering a standard pitch, they create a personalized pitch for the prospects after learning their requirements in the customer’s tone.
Customer-focused approach is a kind of consultative selling style. It doesn’t use the standard selling method but emphasizes on solving the customer’s pain points. Once the pitch is delivered, sales reps will align the product’s features with the customer’s requirements. Hence, showcasing it as a mutually beneficial relationship.
While using the customer-focused selling approach, salesperson focus on:
- Asking more questions
- Offering personalized solutions
- Making more engaged sales conversations
- Giving insightful sales demos
Which results in closing more deals and meeting their sales quota.
Customer-focused selling takes care of the four sections that taken part in the selling process:
- The one-on-one selling method
- Sales planning and analysis
- The customer
- The salesperson
Salesperson should focus on:
- Learning more about the product
- Have good selling skills
- Positive attitude
- Self-confidence
- Resilience
- Self-discipline
- Strong commitment
- Open to feedback
While talking with the prospects, salesperson should see:
- They have a positive attitude in the corporate environment
- Learning how to deal with customers
- Finding about customer’s need
- Any particular style/tone customer follows
- Customer morals and ideals
While doing sales analysis, sales reps should also analyze the following things:
- Customer analysis
- Setting sales objectives
- Determine call strategy & tricks
- Figure out how to better support customer
- Learn to make attractive sales presentation
- Make any backup plans and automate your sales process
Customer-focused selling sells products based on value not on pricing
Whenever sales negotiations are done, sales reps tend to give discounts or lower the price instead of educating the customers. They fail to properly deliver the value which can lead to one-time sale but it wouldn’t be possible to form a long-form relationship with the prospects.
To build long-form relationships with the customers and get repeat sales, you need to focus on delivering value to your prospects. Since, sales reps directly talk with the customers, they can adjust the approach according to the customer and situation. Interested customers will like to learn more about the product, how it solves their problem and how beneficial it can be for them.
Listen to customers
Customer-focused selling approaches focus on listening to your buyers. Having good listening skills gives an upper hand in the selling process.
Hence, it’s important to talk and listen to your customer, solve their queries, take feedback from them and follow a customer-centric approach.
You can also conduct surveys, do a one-on-one session, and ask feedback on social media platforms.
Create opportunities
You can learn about the needs of your customer by collecting customer research and data. Doing your research and analyzing the data, you can get a detailed idea of what your customer wants. This will help you to create experiences that your buyers enjoy and also lets you discover new opportunities to generate predictable results.
Sell experiences
Companies that sell value and experiences and follow a customer-centric approach know how to ask the right questions.
Your job is not to just sell products but also to make your customers’ lives better by learning more about their situation and offering valuable answers that showcases their needs
Solve your customers problem
Want to get repeat sales? One way is to improve your customer service. You can train your sales team to include empathy while talking about customer issues.
It takes time and practice. But after you master this skill, you can easily identify customer’s problems and provide them with a valuable solution that addresses their requirements.
There’s no one-time strategy to boost your sales. If you want to generate more leads, then you need to focus on providing more value, good user experience and adopt a customer-centric approach.