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Sales are made when solutions are aligned to meet the needs of the person you’re targeting. To address those sometimes specific needs, you have to do your homework.
Specify Needs, Magnify Results
Researching a company’s latest achievements through online sources can be helpful if you’re looking for the bare essentials. Still, personal contact is essential to answering, “How can what I’m selling be adapted to benefit my customer’s specific needs?”
Here are four critical points to specifying their needs in pursuit of magnifying your sales results:
1. Listen. Listen. Listen.
This cannot be stressed enough. Perhaps your product or service has multiple capabilities. In the initial presentation of it, you emphasize the wrong feature, and the sale is lost immediately. Listen and ask questions of your prospective buyer because finding their needs is vital to making a sale or selling yourself. Be open to changing your presentation when you meet a new potential customer. According to Sharon Michaels in an article on Forbes – It’s imperative to listen intently without an agenda.
Suppose you decide which lawn care company should fertilize your lawn this year. You contact Company A, and the representative spends the entire phone call emphasizing their brand new lawn clippers. You contact Company B, and the first question the representative asks is, “What are you hoping to accomplish by hiring a lawn care company?”
It may take multiple attempts to connect with a target to find out their needs and even more effort to get them engaged enough to discover their needs. But be persistent!
2. Supply the information.
Once you know their needs, be transparent with your information. Focus your information sharing on those areas where you or your product can best bring value to your buyer’s stated needs.
Let’s say you’re interviewing for a new job. Even though your resume has a detailed outline of your past work and prior accomplishments, the interviewer will still most likely ask questions that can be answered by looking through your resume. They want to hear all information from you to be assured that what you put on paper is exactly what they experience before they hire you.
Your resume is like the owner’s manual for your product. Your customer can look through the manual for their questions to be answered. Still, face-to-face questions and answers will continuously develop the relationship customers naturally seek before buying.
As one of the top needs in the Lifehacks.org blog post “The Six Basic Needs of Customers,” supplying all of the information is essential. You never want to be caught looking like you purposely kept important material from your prospective buyer. The bottom line is providing all information and presenting it as a tool to make your buyer’s life easier. And supplying this information in the context that your buyer is looking for will help you adapt your product pitch!
3. Find the right time.
In addition, the buyers you are targeting have specific times in which they are most likely to be engaged or open to being convinced that their interest can be satisfied with your product in their lives.
“These times are called ‘moments-of-interest ‘and they are crucial moments when your buyer’s interest will make them more open to your sales engagements and provide you with a higher chance of a sale,” according to Opp source –Sales Development Software founder Mark Galloway.
Think about it. You’re at a hair salon, and the stylist has used a product on your hair that feels great and looks even better. She asks, “Are you interested in purchasing this product today?” The hairstylist has taken advantage of your moment of interest. She has just shown you the product’s ability, and you may be in the mindset to buy. Make sure you’re choosing the “moments-of-interest” – this will be the key to presenting the sale at the right moment.
Do the research and understand high and low times of interest so that you are not badgering your target person or not contacting them when they need a problem fixed that you or your product could solve. Be responsive as fast as possible when someone inquires about one of your products.
4. Pursue the right buyer.
Speaking of your targeted buyer, you need to be focused on pursuing the right one whether selling a service or selling yourself, knowing if you or the product will benefit your targeted buyer is essential.
Back to the job interview. You have little to no skill in the hiring division, but you were still given the interview. You are offered the job, but you realize that you will spend more time learning basic techniques and information than actually working in the new position.
Don’t do this to your prospective customer. Do not sell a product with little to no value for the person or their company to get the sale. In the long run, they’ll be happy you were honest about the effort and capabilities you passionately bring to the job!
