PlusOne – Marketing Musings

As a marketing consultant, I speak to many businesses who face some similar problems, which soon becomes a set of problems common to most businesses. One of these is the need to capture more sales from the people already browsing or making inquiries at the shop, business or outlet.

One of the most common problems facing many businesses is sales staff is not aligning with the customer. By this I mean it is very easy to ask a customer what they want (a product based, cash and wrap approach) but it is less easy to determine the customer’s needs (the benefit/solutions approach).

Determining customer needs revolves around avoiding trying to sell the product at all in the early stages, but instead spending the time inquiring about the CIRCUMSTANCES surround their need. This can often be very revealing as to their predominant motives and this in turn can greatly assist in your ability to approach the sales being able to directly relate product benefits to their problems.

This approach was ably demonstrated to me recently when I was shopping for a new cordless phone for the office. The first store I entered approached from the angle of price, and then showing me a range of phones within that range. To find out the features and benefits of each handset was like getting blood out of a stone…I was asking all the questions.

The second store I visited took an entirely different approach. On announcing my need for a cordless phone, the salesperson proceeded to ask relevant questions including:

• Is it for home or office?
• Will the handset be located near the base station?
• Are you in an area where other people may also have cordless phones, resulting in signal noise?
• Will you be moving around with the phone a lot, and if so how far and indoors or outdoors?
• Is it useful to know the caller ID before answering the phone?
• Are you a heavy or occasional user?
• Do you call lots of the same numbers frequently?
• Are you limited by budget?

As you can see that by the time these questions have been answered, the salesperson had a good idea of matching my needs with the equipment available. This resulted in my being shown three different phones, which matched my needs exactly in relation to range, frequency uniqueness, battery life and base station size. The only real decision on my part was aesthetic and to a far lesser extent, price.

Personally I find this process far less stressful and provides me with greater confidence in the product because I know someone has gone to the effort to match my need with product’s features.

The basis behind this example is that research has show that 60% of all purchasing decisions are made in the shop at the time of purchase. This immediately opens up an enormous opportunity for sales staff to satisfy the customer’s desire to buy.

The core theme to introduce to all sales staff is to ‘help customers make a selection’, not ’show customers products’.

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