What Do You Really Know About Your Customer?
Mark Hunter
Sales kickoff speaker helping you turn prospects into profits, it all starts with prospecting with integrity.
You probably don't know your customer as well as you think you know them. As a result, your business is at risk. Below are 10 questions you need to answer to know your customers, so you can better reach each of them.
1. What are my customer’s business objectives for this year?
2. What is my customer’s personal objective for this year?
3. Who are the other people I need to get to know?
4. What are the competitive threats my customer is dealing with?
5. What are the big issues or risks my customer is dealing with?
6. What would happen if my customer lost their biggest customer?
7. Where is my customer’s growth going to come from?
8. How is my customer’s business perceived in their area and their industry?
9. How important is what I sell to their overall business?
10. How important am I to my customer?
Take a moment to answer each of these questions for every one of your major customers. Similarly, these questions work well when analyzing a prospect to determine how you can best help them, too. As you work through them, I'm sure you'll find gaps. That means you have work to do. The sooner you can answer each question, the sooner you will become even more valuable to your customer.
Being seen only as a vendor is a bad place to be; however, if you can’t answer any of these questions, you are nothing but a vendor.
It's going to require a lot of digging to find the answers to all ten of these questions, and the customer must be included in the process. By asking these questions, you are showing the customer that you're not a vendor but someone that really wants to work with them. Certainly, your competitors are not asking these questions.
Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results
Masterful at communicating and delivering business outcome, and skilled connector of people for value creation.
6 年Another PHENOMENAL post by Mark Hunter!
Passion for Sales
6 年Really good article!
Owner | Sales As A Service - ICT& Healthcare | Software | ?? lead generation& qualification | Sales New Business
6 年Pondering: "Being seen only as a vendor is a bad place to be". True! It starts with listening in my opinion, just asking questions is not enough. It is all about dialogue/ interaction, g e n u i n e? interest. "Human nature" is that people are only interested in themselves (seller and buyer). In sales you cannot decide to sell, a buyer can only decide to buy. Therefore it is important to know how buyers convince themselves and their environment.
Fractional Project Manager/Marketing Officer | Budding Woodturning Artist, Going on a hiatus
6 年These are great questions. That is why I try to have annual reviews with my clients before the end of the year. One of the questions which supplements where do they think their growth is going to come from, is where did their best sales or growth come from and what if anything they wanted to improve on that? In other words, is there any way we can diversify from that?? At the end, we always learn something new about each other. :)?