Digital Sales Transformation: In a Customer First World by Donal Daly

Author:Donal Daly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oak Tree Press

CHAPTER 9: KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER FIRST

Introduction

In today’s world of more informed buyers, it is clear that you need to do more than just communicate the capabilities of your product if you are to truly partner with the customer for a long term valuable relationship. But a long term relationship is not arrived at easily or in a single event. Nor is there a common path to follow for all customers. Different customers buy different products or services. Frequency, complexity, urgency of purchase and organizational impact vary. The role of the supplier and salesperson as guide, confidante, and counsel has both a temporal aspect – many things need to happen along the journey – and a texture that must be aware of the buyer’s context.

It’s a truism that most customers don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care. The best way to convince customers that you care is to demonstrate you understand their business, their business issues, the cost of resolution, and the full implications of inaction. Buyers reward sellers who:

• Understand where they are starting from

• Expand their understanding of their business problem

• Provide valuable insights into the business and the market

• Connect the buyer’s priorities to specific solutions.

Delivering value to the customer is not just a Sales function. It’s not just a Marketing function. Against the canvas of the more informed buyer, the always on, always available, completely connected, information source that is the Internet, an organizational approach to being Customer First is a strategic imperative for the whole go-to-market function of the company. Sellers, equipped merely with off-the-shelf elements of marketing collateral, without specific reference to the issues facing the customer, bereft of insights that in and of themselves add value, will lose to more insightful competitors.

The following story paints an all-too-familiar picture:

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