Your Customer is Smarter Than You Think

It would be unwise of you to approach a new prospect or an existing customer and assume they are not informed. In a recent interview I was asked,  Why doesn't the old school sales approach work anymore?" I define the old school sales approach as a sales process that relies very little on connection, questions and information and heavily on hard closing. This approach to selling is responsible for the stigma that many people have about salespeople and creates a reluctance for entrepreneurs to embrace selling in their own business. The answer to this question is simple. People are more informed and have more access to information than any other time in history. Before access to the internet and other media, the salesperson held the cards to all the information and pricing. If the salesperson chose to be dishonest and manipulative, the consumer had little defense against it. Not anymore. Your customer has access to information about you, your competition, pricing, quality and with the explosion of social media, they can find out what other people think in a matter of seconds. Daniel Pink, author of the bestselling book, To Sell Is Human said this about why the Glengarry Glen Ross style of selling has been outdated in an interview with NPR: Twenty years ago, when [David] Mamet wrote that play that [was] made into a movie, when you walked into a Chevy dealer, the Chevy dealer knew a heck of a lot more about cars than you ever could … you didn't have the adequate information. And so this is why we have the principle of caveat emptor, buyer beware. You gotta beware when the other guy knows a lot more than you. "Well, something curious has happened in the last 10 years in that you can walk into a car dealership with the invoice price of the car, something that even the salesmen/women at car dealers didn't know too long ago." No longer buyer beware. We are in the economy of "Seller Beware." Two pieces of advise: Approach your customer with an empathetic ear and listen to their needs. Get out of your own head and see through the eyes of your customer. Spend less time promoting and pushing what you have to offer and more time understanding their problems and how you can help. Have a great week!