Do you know what your customers really want?
Do you find yourself battling over price or fee?

In this day and age of Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, eBay, Global trade, and the access to it through the internet, everyone is offering good quality products and services at similar price points. Often our customers know more about the products and services being sold than even the salespeople representing them which leaves price as the final frontier of selling features. This has caused virtually everything in the marketplace today to become a commodity. So what do you do about it and how do you get price off the table?

Price does not need to be your final frontier of selling features.

At High Output we know that there are 3 fundamental truths to selling anything anywhere to anyone. But first and foremost amongst those is that 75% of your success or failure comes down to the level of trust and rapport you establish with your customers in the initial stages of your presentation and in the building of your relationships with them.

I’ve just finished reading one of the most thought provoking and well researched books on the subject of sales I’ve come across. In his book “Achieve Sales Excellence – The 7 Customer Rules For Becoming The New Sales Professional” Howard Stevens CEO of the HR Chally Group shows us by tracking the spending patterns of corporate America against the attributes of the sales people doing the selling what corporate clients really want. And, if it just so happens that you’re in the retail or B2C sectors, sit up and take note, these apply to you too.

Here’s what your customers demand:

1. Advisors who truly understand their businesses or situations.
   Your customers want sales people and business partners that take the time to understand their businesses and unique situations well enough to act as trusted advisors, offer unbiased perspective and provide solutions that help them achieve their goals. They are not buying your products or services, they are buying the outcomes that those products and services produce: better ROI, better efficiency & productivity, the satisfaction of their own internal and external customers, and the confidence that they are making the best purchasing decision amongst the myriad of choices available to them.
2. Partners who understand their own companies.
   Your customers want sales professionals who they trust to understand the workings of their own companies well enough to manipulate the internal politics, policies and systems to deliver the outcomes that they promised. They need to know that you will act as their advocate within your company and sell internally just as hard as you do externally with them to achieve the results promised to them.
3. Personal accountability.
   They are looking for business partners who are personally accountable for the results delivered and are willing to step up without excuses and take responsibility to fix the problem if and when things go awry . They don’t expect you to have all the answers nor to take all the heat, but they do expect you to be easily accessible and act as the single point of contact to making it all happen.

None of these customer demands have anything to do with the traditional skills typically associated with selling such as prospecting, probing and closing the sale. Everyone of these demands has everything to do with the 75% success factor that’s directly correlated to the trust that you deliver on those 3 fronts. Sales people take note: You can’t close before you open. And opening the sale simply means establishing rapport and conveying that you’ve got a deep understanding of where your customer is coming from and what he or she really needs.

Of course it’s important to know how to prospect, how to uncover the true need and how to close. There is a process to it and at High Output we do teach our clients how to professionally perform these tasks, but more importantly we help them build true differentiation into their sales process and show them how to become those trusted professional advisors that their customers want.

If you can stay away from trying to make the perfect pitch, and get into the habit of asking intelligent questions (spending 20% of your time talking (asking) and 80% listening to the answers), and then making purchasing recommendations based on your understanding of the client’s situation, you will be well on your way to establishing true value equations in you, your company and your product or service offerings. When you do that price is off the table and your customer has gotten what they really want.