"Customerized" Selling

Продажи
	Sales.com
		Assessing...

by Miller Heiman

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in selling is to make assumptions. Jumping to conclusions about what your customer wants or needs is a sure way to ruin the full potential of a sale or to quash a sale altogether. Unfortunately, some salespeople believe the secret to success is to force the customer in the direction they feel best serves their needs. We've even heard such damaging advice as, "Don't let the customer control the conversation," and "Establish right off that you're in charge of the situation." This manipulative technique almost always backfires.

By dominating the conversation with a customer, you will never really learn what the customer's concept is, that is, what the potential buyer expects you and/or your product to do for him-in short, the results that this particular person is seeking. You deliver results by insisting on customized, or more accurately, "customerized" selling. In a highly-competitive environment, where buyers have a vast array of choices, "customerizing" the sale is the only way the seller can survive long-term. We can illustrate this with two examples.

A friend of ours recently drove his road-worn sports car up to a car showroom, got out, and was met at the curb by an eager young floor salesman. Since our friend had driven up in a sports car, the salesman made the ostensibly reasonable assumption that he probably wanted a replacement. So, once inside, the youngster fell all over himself pointing out the compression ratios and zero-to-sixty speeds of the sports models they had on display.

But his assumption was unreasonable - and fatal. In fact, our friend and his wife had just had their second child, and had reluctantly decided that it was time to trade in the sports car of his wild oats youth for a more practical model. His concept of a new car, in other words, was built around the need for more room - not for an Indy 500 ride. Because the young salesman didn't find this out up front, he wasted our friend's time, and his own, and eventually assumed himself right out of a commission.

Here's the second example. Another friend of ours entered a men's clothing store intending to buy a blazer. He asked the sales clerk for assistance, and instead of giving him the usual "Size 39s over there, sir," he said, "Why don't we sit down for a couple of minutes, and you tell me about your wardrobe." For ten minutes they talked about the colors he liked, the styles he preferred, the kind of functions he attended. "It was amazing," he told us later. "He actually took notes about color schemes. I walked out of there with two jackets, two pair of slacks, a sweater, and three ties."

That was customerized selling. It was selling that made no assumptions; that began not with the product but with the customer's individual interests and values and needs; and that demonstrated once again the basic truth that good selling always starts with the customer's concept.