This is an age-old question that has kept many a business owners awake at night, especially when facing tough economic times!
Well, let’s start at the very beginning of the sales process. Customers want to feel valued and important in their dealings with potential or existing suppliers. In recent times with the advent of e-commerce, the digitalization of marketing products, and automated AI assistance, there are fewer and fewer customer interactions with real human salespeople! Does this sound familiar to you?
This tendency has frustrated many customers, as it seems the focus has shifted away from offering customer service to cost cutting and/or maximizing profits. Everyone knows how frustrating it is to deal with some serious issues when humans are removed from the process and robotic AI steps in to ‘assist’ customers. This is particularly annoying when a customer first tries to convey an issue to a supplier! Has anyone figured out that it takes longer to get problems resolved robotically than it does talking to an actual human being?
Customers also prefer to engage with salespeople who have excellent product knowledge and who are interested in their business and needs. There is limited time during customer meetings, so salespeople should be mindful of getting their key messages across, finding out as much as possible about what the customer needs, and then marrying up what is on offer with what is required. Never try and sell people something they don’t need or want, as it lessens your credibility. Rather look for solutions to problems and always focus on benefits to the customer. Let’s be brutally honest, how many customers would change suppliers they are very happy with if there weren’t any truly worthwhile benefits in doing so?
Selling is often the easy part, but what happens when something goes wrong? This is often where mediocre suppliers are differentiated from brilliant suppliers. Salespeople need to be practical and resourceful when there are issues or problems that occur in the supply chain, production, QA, or due to an accident, or mistake of some kind.
Customers want problems resolved ASAP with a minimum of additional cost (if any) to themselves. Salespeople need to understand the importance of accessibility and timeliness when dealing with such problems.
So, to summarize then, customers expect salespeople to have excellent product knowledge skills, lots of empathy, excellent listening skills, be resourceful and practical in their approach, not waste their valuable time, always have the customer’s interests at heart, be readily contactable (within reason), and able to facilitate or solve problems ASAP. This list is by no means exhaustive, as there are many other attributes customers expect from salespeople.
Let Macadamy provide the training your salespeople need to be exactly what customers expect!
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