Stop Acting Like a Seller and Start Thinking Like a Buyer: Improve Sales Effectiveness by Helping Customers Buy by Jerry Acuff

Author:Jerry Acuff [Acuff, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2009-05-17T14:00:00+00:00

GOOD QUESTIONS FORCE PEOPLE TO THINK

Ideally, you want to ask questions that force people to think. Mental self-inquiry is a powerful tool in selling and persuading. You don’t have to think very deeply when somebody asks, “Where are you from?” But you might need to think for a while if somebody asks, “How do you feel about raising the age limit for Social Security?”

Good questions create the opportunity for you to learn how your customers and prospects think, and the questions give them an opportunity to formulate their thoughts (which in itself is powerful). Many times we ask questions about something people have not thought about before, or they haven’t thought about it in the way we’ve framed the question. Often the real power of our questions is in helping people see or think of things differently.

Professor Dan Weilbaker of Northern Illinois University says that students in the sales program (like entry-level salespeople generally) tend to assume they know what is important to the customer. Or they assume they know what prospects are looking for and what they need without engaging them in a conversation or asking questions. “It’s the old ‘book and the cover’ proverb: You think you know the book because you looked at the cover. For a beginning salesperson or student, this is one of the biggest obstacles we have to overcome. Because they have the product knowledge, they assume they can sell the product because they know what is important. I think knowledge itself is sometimes a culprit.”

Everyone agrees that product knowledge is necessary, says Dan; it’s the price of entry. But it becomes the culprit in hobbling sales performance because it tends to drive behavior. Salespeople sometimes feel that because they have the product knowledge, they know what is important and the customer doesn’t.

Dan remembers a story about IBM: “When IBM was selling a lot of hardware, new salespeople would grow their business for about 20 months, and then business would suddenly plateau. Management tried to figure out what it was and finally learned that the salespeople, by the end of 20 months, had so much product knowledge and other information they could walk into an account and immediately tell the customer what would solve their problems.”

But they couldn’t sell the customer, because they were not even trying to learn the customer’s situation. It was as if they did not involve the customer at all in the solution; because they knew so much, they were the resident experts. They could diagnose a problem quickly, but they didn’t engage the customers. They didn’t spend time building relationships or giving the customer a chance to talk so their sales hit a plateau.

That is the danger of focusing entirely on product knowledge. It gives salespeople the wrong idea of its importance; they then put product knowledge above everything else. They think they can ignore their mind-set and the business relationship because product knowledge is so important, it will do the entire job. But we know that it is not the case.

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