In our last blog post, we looked at creating the ultimate sales playbook for your sales team, and started the article off by defining an objective and keeping the playbook simple.
Today, I want us to look at how your playbook can help your sales team get inside your customer’s mind. So then, let’s kick off with how your sales team can get inside your customer’s mind!
Sales Playbook Tip 3 – Getting inside your customer’s mind
Pop quiz: What’s more important? Your customers or your products/ services? If you answered “Products” or “Services”, you’d be wrong. Very wrong. You see, your customers are more important than your products. I’ll never forget what Jerry Gregoire, the CIO over at Dell once said:
“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”
Here are some great stats for anyone that still believes products and services are more important than the customer.
- 88% of customers prefer doing business with a company that offers quality customer service over a company that has the latest and most innovative products – Harris Interactive.
- 69% of customers switch brands due to real or perceived poor service – Michaelson & Associates.
- Only 13% of customers will switch to another company because of the actual quality of a product or service – Michaelson & Associates.
So now you see why it’s so important to get into the minds of the customers and really get to know them. When putting your sales playbook together, make sure you guide your sales team to find the needs of your customers. What do your customers want? What are their pains? How are they likely to react to the product or service you’re offering?
When you’ve answered these questions in your sales playbook, you’ll be well on your way to ensuring that the focus is all about making your customer feel that your product or service is the solution they are looking for, and the thing they’ve always been looking for!
To finalise this point, I want you to do an exercise. Here at Momentum, we do this all the time with our customers, and it works really well. Go and grab a piece of paper and a pen. Title this exercise “Customer Challenges”. Draw a line in the center of your page and to the left, add the title “List Challenges”. On this side, I want you to list the challenges of your customers. On the right side of your paper, I want you to title that section “List Solutions”. Now write out all the solutions to the challenges your customers face, and why your product or service will be the shining light and the solution to your customers challenges. Once you’ve done this, take a photo of your list and place it in your playbook. Then do this exercise with your sales team, but get them to find different challenges and solutions. Remember, your sales team need to make your product or service look and feel like it’s the very thing that your customers crave, and to get to that point, your customers need to feel relaxed in the presence of your sales team, not intimidated.
The next article is going to take you to an even higher level, so watch this space!
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