When I saw this on the quirky blog Sober in a Nightclub it made me laugh out loud and it illustrates a very important point.
Empathy is the root of all success. Pay your prospective customers the respect of being prepared.
Customers only care about their problems and you better know how to relate your offering to their specific need. Just selling a general use tool and hoping that your target customers can figure out how to use it is a recipe for mediocrity.
A call center I inherited would call targets and ask if they had any need for a laser. As you might expect the response rate was very low since many targets did not see any need for a laser (insert your product here).
When the questions changed to a needs focus the results improved significantly. The call center started to ask if the target used any labeling or identification for their parts or if they did any engraving. Once the target answered ‘yes’ then the call center could show how a laser would potentially solve those and other problems. Pretty basic stuff though I am still surprised at how common this type of thinking is.
Are you really putting yourself in your target customer’s shoes and understanding their issues BEFORE you engage them and try to sell them?
How about service? Is your service team completely prepared to react in a proactive and exceptional way to any questions your customer answers? This should be easy – you are the expert, right?
If you understand them first you will not have to sell them - they will want to buy. They expect you to think of everything so they do not have to.
