Seeing With Your Customer's Eyes

by Graham Denton

"Look at the situation with your customer's eyes." This is one of the most important elements of world-class selling, and sometimes you have to take the injunction very literally. I proved this to myself many years ago when, as a college kid on summer vacation, I took a job selling vermiculite to grocery stores.

Vermiculite is a volcanic glass that, under heat, explodes like popcorn and becomes absorbent. Its most common use is as a garden mulch, but that summer, as the single salesman for a small New Jersey company, I was peddling the stuff as what we called "charcoal base." You would empty a bag of the white pellets into the bottom of your backyard grill and then put a layer of charcoal on top of it. Resting on the vermiculite, the charcoal would burn more efficiently, so you'd need less of it -- and you would keep your grill clean. A good, simple product, and although it never caught on nationally, it kept me in gas and cherry Cokes for that one summer.

I learned the "customer's eyes" lesson one afternoon in a Grand Union outside of Poughkeepsie. It was late June, and I was intent on putting large displays of our product up in all my stores. There was a certain mercenary element to this plan because I was paid a dollar commission on each ten-bag carton I sold. But there was also good merchandising logic because a bigger display attracts more customer attention. So my vision was to put up really imposing displays.

In the Poughkeepsie store, the produce manager was a burly character named Vinnie. Vinnie didn't like the huge display idea, and for what, in retrospect, I see as a very good reason: He had no room. What his eyes were seeing were boxes of bananas in the aisles and an overflowing stockroom. The last thing he wanted that weekend was thirty or forty bags of vermiculite getting in his way. As I poised my pen eagerly on the order form, he said, "I'll take one carton."

"One carton? Why, that won't last you two days in this prime grilling weather. I'd recommend, for this weekend, at least four or five."

Vinnie looked at me with the bemused disdain that I deserved and said simply, "I don't think so."

I fumed and argued for a while, and I got in one carton. I was lucky at that, too, because until I finally gave in, my self-serving discounting of Vinnie's perspective was on the verge of souring his mood and getting me evicted. If that had happened, I could have written off future business with that store.

Making a dollar a stop wasn't exactly what I had had in mind that day, but that particular dollar was the price of a valuable lesson. Always begin with what's in the customer's mind -- with what Miller Heiman-trained professionals call the customer's Concept. If you begin, as I did originally, with the great product that you have to sell -- or, even worse, with a focus on your own commission -- you risk coming off as insensitive or manipulative.

On the other hand, if you strive to size up the situation as your customer is seeing it, you may or may not make the immediate sale. But you'll establish yourself as a partner in that customer's success. Which makes it much more likely that, somewhere down the line, he or she will be willing to look at things through your eyes.