Is Your Sales Process for You or for Your Customer?

A good measure of whether your sales / business process creates the ultimate customer experience is by simply asking this question.

If you would feel suspicious about sharing with your customer the ins and outs of your process and why you do it, then it may be fair to ask whether your process is creating an unpleasant customer experience and potentially even driving business away from you.

Things like: withholding information, not answering questions, waiting until the end of the presentation to give them what they came for, making the customer provide a lot of information upfront, and collecting data for data’s sake rather than focusing on the customer’s needs, wants, and problems – these are all pet peeves, annoyances, and speed-bumps which actually block your way, more often than not, to getting a sale from your customer.

Many customers are so disappointed with salespeople today not because the price was too high, or the terms were bad – but because the process was unpleasant. This can happen instantly, when you answer your customer’s question incredulously, or with a bad attitude, or when you insist that things must be done in A-B-C order before you can give the customer the information they are looking for.

There are very subtle turn-offs to a customer all along your process from start to end, from the onset of receiving a new lead to the climactic close of the first sale, all along the touch-points a sales process. How many customers have you lost because you were chasing the wrong goal – gaining brownie points by chasing vanity metrics, collecting CRM data while wasting the customer's valuable time, withholding important information from your prospect, or forcing your prospect to feel obligated – just because that's the process you were taught to follow?

If you can flip around your process and make it – not 100% but – let’s say 90% focused on the customer, while still maintaining your foothold of position and margin you need to thrive in business, how many more customers would be ‘wowed’ by the experience you gave them, give you repeat business and refer their friends and family to you?

Are you serving your prospects and customers, or are you undermining your relationships by serving a ‘process’ that doesn’t actually serve your customer and doesn’t get YOU closer to getting more deals done? 

Yrs. truly,

Dave Escamilla