Three Sales and Marketing Myths: Myth One

In today’s uncertain environment, selling more requires you to be on top of your game.  Over the next three blog posts, we’ll debunk some common sales myths, so you can strike out less and sell more.

Myth 1: My customers know what they want.

The belief that customers know what they want is the foundation of the marketing research industry. Focus groups, surveys, depth interviews and other techniques have been developed to measure customer “demand” for goods and services. This “naturally-occurring” demand is for sought goods, and these sought good are typically commodities. In contrast un-sought goods, the goods & services that people do not buy until they are made aware that they exist need to be sold.

When something needs to be sold, we agree that customers are aware of their wants and needs. Yet in those same decisions, the solution to the customer’s want or need is not apparent to them.  Therefore, if something has to be sold, you typically don’t have demand until something “happens” and the person needs to respond to a problem and do something.

As a result, much of the high-value effort expended in a successful sales process is focused on defining, clarifying, and qualifying the customer’s expressed need. A successful sales process is focused on discovery of the “root cause” of the customer’s expression of need. The outcome of this effort indicates potential solutions to the need.

Most sales reps are trained and incentivized to tell the customer that he needs the stuff the salesperson is selling. In contrast, the successful sales professional investigates the customer and illuminates existing, and often undefined needs.  Once made aware of these needs, and sufficiently motivated to take action to fix them, customers become demanding, i.e. they demand to have a solution applied to their want-need.

When seen in this light, sales effort is about creating demand, as much as it is about responding to demand. When we put a customer in-touch with the root cause of those expressed needs we are creating demand, and during demand creation, customers are on the path to making a decision.

Let’s look at a decision, and how it progresses.

Every decision is in essence an extended transition from an irrational emotional phase, to a rational phase, and then to a fulfillment phase. This means that when addressing a decision, salespeople and marketing managers need to focus on emotional drivers. The task is to probe and amplify the emotional needs of the customers first; dig into their personal connection the problem, their fears, and anxieties about making the wrong decision, and their potential wins in a good decision. The purpose of this deliberate exploration of emotions is to uncover the real issue or what we refer to as The HURT. The HURT is the root cause of the customer’s expression of need…”I need a new TV.” Instead of asking “which TV do you want?” the HURT focused professional will ask, ”why do you need a new TV?”

Many times the business problem causing the decision is large, undefined, and somewhat scary. With all these emotions buzzing around, it’s really not fair to expect people to have the clarity and presence of mind to consider things logically. Consequently, during the emotional phase of a decision there is a lot of bias on the part of the customer. They’re doing their best to recall their experience and what they think they need to do when they’re expressing their needs. The problem is, customers often don’t have enough experience with complex decisions, and they may be inadvertently over-simplifying or misinterpreting what is needed to completely and effectively solve their problem. This bias is why we need salespeople to aid in the problem discovery and understanding process. Salespeople see and participate in far more complex transactions in a single year than many customers will experience in their entire career.

Salespeople are a resource to customers because of this higher degree of experience with complex decisions. As a professional salesperson, you have an ethical responsibility to your customers to make sure that the decision progresses in an orderly and safe manner. Our experience has shown that when skillfully practiced, this high touch process of discovery builds credibility, and is also the platform that long term, reciprocal and sustaining business relationships are built upon.

In the end, your presence as a salesperson is required because many decisions’ positive outcome rest upon an incomplete understanding of the problem. Salespeople who engage in the selling process to develop this understanding build trust and can deliver value.

The recommended course of action then is this: sell them what they want and need, but help them understand what they need first.

Stay tuned for our next post– Myth Two: Lowering Your Price Can Increase Sales

Image courtesy of andrechinn