Understanding Your Customer
One of the difficult tasks for a sale professional is to understand what their customer is thinking. As sales people, our job is to sell our company's products, profitably. The way we do that, can differentiate us from our competitors. If we can understand our customer's concept of how they see our solutions helping them solve their challenge, we can help shape that concept- and win more business.
I was fortunate that the first company I worked for out of college understood the role of a sales person. I worked for an independent welding supply in Salina, Kansas. We were a premium priced, high service supplier. Our business model was "take a store to your door". The sales team drove the big trucks with gas cylinders and supplies and we sold and delivered off of those trucks. Our sales motto was "Find a need and fill it". It wasn't; sell them what we have - we were a distributor of the same products that our competitors were selling. "Find a need and fill it" has stuck with me for over 25 years. We couldn't find a need without asking questions to discover a need. We had to ask questions to understand what the customer was trying to fix, and relate how my solution could help them do just that.
Selling through a national distributor is more challenging because we are not really selling product. We are selling to capture mind share of the distributor contact. The sale is the same in the sense that we must align our solution to their need. We must understand their concept. If we understand what the distributor sales person is trying to accomplish, and align our solution to help them accomplish their goals, we earn a disproportionate amount of their time. That also leads to an annuity of profitable revenue. It's a simple term, but a powerful idea. Find a need and fill it.
