Experienced sales people know that their primary task is to identify and resolve a customer’s need. Look for pain points and propose solutions to remove the pain.
Customers know this too which is why they often want to shortcut the selling process by quickly categorizing your proposal and focusing on the price for pain removal. How you react defines how seriously the customer will consider your proposal. This is the decisive moment. How will you respond?
Resolving a customer’s current pain is a must, but how you behave in doing so determines the basis of your relationship.
If you work in isolation to solve only a customer’s immediate problem or need, without learning why this is important to the customer, then you waste the leverage of your expertise and lose the opportunity to be distinctive from competitors.
But if you can discover why resolving this pain is beneficial for the customer, and then specify how your product or service produces value to help achieve their goal, then you are doing more than addressing the current pain – you are helping them progress towards their chosen future.
Resolving one need or pain point is worth doing, but it’s more compelling when your solution supports the customer’s longer-term plan. When their future is addressed as well as their current pain, then working together on your proposed solution is an obvious thing for the customer to do because they recognize your commitment to them. Learning what a customer seeks to achieve and what they aspire to be, and then producing quantifiable value that helps them achieve their goals, separates you from competitors and makes you an irreplaceable partner in their success.
One-time customers become recurring customers when they realize that you genuinely care about their business. Enduring, mutually profitable relationships are the result.
How do you respond at the decisive first contact moment with a prospective customer?
What must you do differently to strengthen your response?
