50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People: Habit #15 – How Does Your Customer/Prospect Make Money?

September 21, 2015 Selling Comments Off on 50 Habits of Top Performing Sales People: Habit #15 – How Does Your Customer/Prospect Make Money?

Continuing with the twelve Sales Skills, let’s look at Habit #15 – How Does Your Customer/Prospect Make Money?

Understand your customer’s/prospect’s processes and the value that you, your company and your product or service delivers to your customer’s/prospect’s processes.

Last month’s newsletter talked about using an Initial Benefit Statement at the beginning of the sales call, to summarize agreed benefits thus far in the sales cycle. This month let’s focus on the importance of understanding how your customer makes money.

Salespeople get wrapped up in the day-to-day, making sales calls, developing, submitting and reviewing quotations and all the stuff they have to do to keep up with everyday customer and prospect demands. One of the critical things that needs to be understood is how your customer/prospect makes money. As stated in earlier newsletters, “It’s all about the money”.

Having a thorough understanding of how your customer/prospect makes money, demands that you have a thorough understanding of your customer’s/prospect’s processes. In other words, what are the steps the customer/prospect goes through in order to generate a product or service and how do you add value (increase the profit) of that product or service?

When this is tied with earlier discussions involving developing sales plans and developing a target account strategy, you see that leveraging successes with existing customer’s/prospect’s allows you the ability to understand similar customer/prospect processes.

Leveraging this understanding allows you to be very efficient in the use of your time because it’s almost impossible to understand every industry and the processes within those industries. So, penetrating industries in which you have had success is a rational and logical approach to maximizing the use of your time and money.

In addition to all the benefits above, understanding your customer’s/prospect’s processes, and the value that you can bring to those processes, makes you valuable to the customer/prospect. If you can become a valued member of your customer’s/prospect’s team, you have achieved something only Top Performers achieve.

Being recognized as a member of the team puts you at the beginning of any sales cycle. It gives you an inside track, allows you to specify your product or services and insures, because of the relationship that you have established, that you will be in the driver’s seat when it comes time for the purchase order. This strategy is simple, easy to execute, requires patience to execute and is a success-oriented strategy.

“A Habit” is not work, but just a thing that is done every day and understanding your customer’s/prospect’s processes and the value that you, your company and your product or services delivers to your customer’s/prospect’s processes can easily become a Habit.

TIME MANAGEMENT. For Top Performers every task is planned and focused on the goals that earn the results. Top Performers plan and then engage. They act on their plans, they work hard and they get results.

Coaching these skills is a critical part of what we do. We are here to help you develop and implement your Strategic Plan and coach and develop the skills to implement the plan successfully.

We are having great success coaching and implementing these methods and skills and our clients love it!