If you are looking for powerful reasons for a prospect to buy, ask those who have already bought from you.
I’ve been pondering the need for companies to interview their satisfied (and not so satisfied) customers. I say interview instead of visit or make a sales call. Relevance Marketing can find loads of ammunition to relate to prospects from those who know your product/service from the other side of the table from you.
Customers Know What They Know, and You Need to Know It Too
It is so effective people try it once and then never try it again. Everyone knows the satisfied customer can give them a ton of useful info on why they bought and why they like your offerings. Customer interviews may also tell you what they don’t like, which might be the most important info you’ll gather from the effort. It is human nature that when something works this well, we rarely ever use it again. Go figure.
Interviews with Satisfied Customer will provide:
• Great benefit statements for toe-to-toe selling
• Powerful quotations for brochures, sales letters, your website, etc.
• Insight into how customers/users think about your wares
• Understanding about how they use it that you never imagined
• Ways to help them learn to use your products/services better
• New uses for what you sell you’ve never thought of
• Places where you’re not delivering like you think you are
Customer Interviews with the Not Quite Satisfied will provide:
• Insight into where and how you’ve failed
• Corrections to make in training and support
• Corrections to make in your products/services
• How you’re over promising in your sales and/or marketing
• People who might not be putting your company’s best foot forward
The Interview Process
You have to make it a relatively formal interview to produce the proper mindset in the client. If you are the sales person, make it so you are NOT the sales person in your mind and your demeanor when you’re talking to them. Either get yourself out of thinking like a sales person or have someone else in your organization do the interviews.
I’ve suggested before that reps should trade territories – Rep 1 interviews Rep 2’s customers and 2 interviews 1’s. No one ever agrees with me, but it is a good idea. Field reps recognize what would be helpful in selling before anyone else would, but by working in another’s territory, there will be no personal reason to cover up whatever is discovered. You do have to offer blanket amnesty to all your reps and mean it.
Thinking on it, that’s probably why no one has ever agreed to do it my way.
Questions – Create open-ended, how, what, and why questions to gather info. When you hear, “You guys are the greatest,” it’s complimentary, but useless for your purposes.
1) Ask a broad “How do you like it” question to get people to open up.
2) Then ask why questions on those answers to go for details.
3) Next ask your specific questions in areas you feel are very important to all customers – these are the features of your offerings you feel causes everyone to want to buy.
4) Finally as questions such as, “What else do you feel is important that I haven’t mentioned?”
If you need help defining these questions for your use, call me.
If you’d like an outsider to perform these interviews, call me.
When the Customer Isn’t Always Right
Quite often you will have some capability in your product/service that you know is startling, amazing, perhaps even revolutionary – and yet your customers don’t get it.
The ones that buy do so for all the other features and benefits, and either use your killer attribute only occasionally or not all.
Do some true soul searching and determine if this capability is as astounding as you feel it is, and if it is, bear down hard to make some customer or prospect truly see what you see.
In the early days, people bought PCs because they were more powerful than typewriters and cheaper than dedicated word processing systems. Many of you have no idea what I’m talking about.
I’ve written on the amazing power of digital presses and how so many printing companies missed the opportunity they afforded. Most have purchased them because they were lightning fast and lower cost for printing short run jobs. They were great on such work, and those who bought them and mostly used them that way found themselves fairly quickly in bidding wars with other printers who used their new digital presses for that same purpose as well.
But a few of the early buyers invested in the data and design expertise and equipment to turn their digital presses into major marketing machines for their clientele. These companies tripled and quadrupled the profit percentages they made with their presses as opposed to the “short runs only” guys.
Such innovators are still racking up substantial profits because they sell their prospects verifiable methods to succeed in business, not printing – sounds like Marketing with Relevance to me.
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These are two examples of users not getting a great concept and missing out because of it.
The flip side is that perhaps you don’t really have the great innovation you think you do. Or perhaps you are before your time.
Regardless, your only hope to make your case for your powerful innovation is to use Relevance Marketing to capture your prospects’ imagination, not just get enough attention to barely sell your goods.
