Focus on Customers Results: Three Clues to Good Selling

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by Miller Heiman

Customers, just like you and just like everyone in business, are always looking for results. Only if they think you can provide them with the results they need will they want to hear about your product. To be more specific, we have found that the conceptual results a customer expects always relate to one or more of three basic areas:

1. Discrepancy. By discrepancy we mean a perceived gap in the prospect's mind (not your mind) between where he is right now and where he wants to be. Unless someone perceives such a gap between his current situation and an ideal--and unless he believes that you can help him bridge that gap--you can pretty much forget about making a sale.

You know the old joke about how hard it is to buy something for the guy who has everything. It's ten times as hard to sell that guy something. If your potential customer is perfectly content with his current situation, there's no way he'll expect you to deliver results that can improve it. In short: no discrepancy, no sale.

For example, say I'm currently driving a five-year-old automobile with 90,000 miles on it. It has most of the options I want--except for a cassette tape player--and looks fairly good for its age. If I'm completely satisfied with it as is, there's no discrepancy and therefore no point in your trying to sell me a new car. But if the neighbor's stares are getting me down, or if the rust on the left rear fender is beginning to embarrass me, there is an obvious gap between where I am and where I would like to be. Discrepancy has changed my concept of "new car" so that I am more open to a possible sale.

2. Importance. In addressing the customer's concept, you always need to be alert to the level of importance he or she assigns to a given task to be accomplished. Take the car-minus-cassette scenario. If I'm just vaguely dissatisfied with the lack of a cassette because I'd like some music as I drive, then the discrepancy is low, the importance is low, and there's not much chance of a sale. But say I'm on the road twenty or thirty hours a week, I've got to review taped material frequently, and I want to optimize the use of my road time. Then the importance level may rise, and a salesperson who addresses my concept about a tape player--that is, my expectation that it will improve my road time--will have a good chance of selling me one, or of selling me a car with one in it.

3. Solving a problem. If your customer has an urgent problem, the discrepancy level is by definition going to be high. If you can provide something that dovetails with the ideal solution he has in mind, your chances of making the sale are very good. That's obvious enough. What's not so obvious is that, even if your customer's problem is not staring him in the face at the moment, you might still be able to sell to him by demonstrating that your solution can help him avoid a problem in the future.

Take the car with the 90,000 miles. Let's face it, at that mileage the maintenance and repair bills are probably going to be running you a couple of hundred dollars a month in the near future, so you may be faced with the classic "trouble avoidance" option of "pay me now or pay me later." If my concept about a new car is that it will free me from the anxiety over the old one breaking down, then your chances of selling me one will be good--if you pick up on my concept and focus on your maintenance-free models.

To sum it up: picking up on the customer's concept is not incidental to good selling. It's the basis on which all long-term success is built, because it's the only thing that ties in directly to what the buyer believes needs to get done.