CHAPTER 20

Making Your Selling Memorable

How do you create memorable peak experiences for the customer? A variety of factors will influence how you approach this essential step in your selling. Your customer, the product or service you are selling, your personal sales strengths and style, your company, the size of the opportunity, and your customer’s decision-making process will all influence how you create memorable sales interactions. However, aside from the tactics that you will employ to create a peak event during a sales interaction, some fundamental strategies should form the baseline of your selling efforts. In this chapter, I will discuss some of these strategies and how to use them in your selling to differentiate yourself from the other options the customer is evaluating.

But first remember that you have the ability to dictate and control your own success in sales. I came of age in selling in the computer industry when IBM still had an 80 percent market share. A lot of customers were just not going to buy from anyone but IBM. However, the rise of the Internet and the access it provides to information of all kinds to support decision making have changed the willingness of customers to consider a broader range of potential suppliers. Think about how the power of the brand-name product is rapidly diminishing across all industries. A study by Ernst & Young found that only 25 percent of the Americans surveyed said that brand loyalty had an impact on how they made purchase decisions. This creates opportunities for all sellers to compete for new business with customers who were previously closed to them.

Here are strategies to use Peak/End selling to your advantage:

Stop selling and start serving. Yes, you read that correctly. Stop selling—at least consciously. Now is the time to reorient your thinking about what you do on a daily basis. If your customer’s objective is to gather the information in order to make informed decisions more quickly and at a lower cost, then it is your primary responsibility to make that happen. Being selfless and focused on the needs of the customer is an incredibly effective trust-building step.

Transition from seller to advisor. As you learn more about a customer’s motivations and justifications for buying a product like yours, the composition of the information that you are providing will change. As customers move through their buying processes, they require less product content and more business insights. Whether based on the experiences of other customers, your industry expertise, third-party research, or some other source, you want your customers to rely on your business acumen to advise and guide them to a decision. Any insight that can help customers understand more fully how your product can be used to produce results that will meet or exceed their expectations can produce a peak event. Any insight that will help customers more completely understand the financial returns to be generated from using your product is also such an event.

Make it easy. Make it easy for customers to get necessary information from you. This is what buying and selling are all about. Too many companies get all bound up by their own rigid sales procedures and make their customers work too hard to get the information they need. Think about how you sell from the perspective of the customer. If you were a customer of your own company, what would you expect the buying experience to be like?

Deliver value. Deliver value on every single sales interaction with a customer. As mentioned in Chapter 12, every sales interaction with a customer has the potential to be the peak experience for them with you. It cannot be predicted in advance which step of the selling process will be the most important. Be respectful of the customer’s time. Eliminate ad hoc sales calls, which, like check-in calls, provide no value to anyone. Remember that you are trying to maximize the customer’s return on time invested (ROTI) in you.

Turn the customer into an internal advocate. There is a moment in a buying process when your primary points of customer contact morph into sellers themselves. That transformation is a peak experience. Once they have their buying vision firmly locked into place, they’ll have a feeling of ownership because they worked with you to develop it. Now a good percentage of the time they have allocated to their buying process will be spent selling that vision to the internal resources that influence and ultimately approve the purchase decision. Part of your role is to give your customers the tools they need to be successful on your behalf. They need continuing access to the content, insights, and stories on which their buying vision sits.

Provide unconditional support. Salespeople usually think of support as a postsales event. But it applies to presales as well. At some point in virtually every sales cycle, there will be a hiccup. In the worst cases, even with supremely well-qualified prospects, the sales process can come to a screeching halt. At that point, the salesperson needs to put on a service hat. Similar to a support person working to resolve a customer problem as fast as possible, the salesperson must do whatever it takes to address the problem and start the process moving forward again. Remember, when it comes to support, customers’ problems are always valid. They might not always be right. But from their perspective, a legitimate problem needs to be addressed immediately. Do whatever it takes to fix it. Receiving unconditional support is always a peak experience.

Accommodate the extraordinary. As salespeople, we have a natural tendency to want to slot customers into a niche that aligns with our own sales process. “This customer is in Industry B. I sell to all Industry B customers this way.” The problem is that customers are not one-size-fits-all. And they can usually recognize when they run into a rigid sales process that conflicts with how they want to gather information. At that moment of recognition, do you default to, “I’m sorry, I’m afraid we can’t do that.” Or do you work with the customer to determine the information needed and brainstorm alternative methods for procuring it?

Sweat the small stuff. Who pays attention to the small stuff? Your customer does. I once had a colleague, Hal, who assiduously sent handwritten thank-you notes to every person he had had contact with in his selling. Once I went on a sales call with Hal to a customer he thought would soon close. The customer’s desk had just a few papers on it. But on top of everything was a thank-you note from Hal. He won the order. Did his note make a difference? You tell me.

Invest in yourself. Salespeople have to invest the time and energies they have available for self-improvement on the knowledge-based sales skills like those I have covered in this book. Don’t get me wrong. I believe it is important to allocate time to improve your activity-based skills such as how to make better cold calls, improve sales presentations, make more social connections, write a better proposal, craft a better subject line on an e-mail, ask for the order, and so on. The problem is that activity-based skills are all sales-centric; in and of themselves, they deliver minimal value to the customer. The power of knowledge-based skills is that they can convert intangible benefits to tangible value. Responsiveness can shorten the customer’s buying process. This has a quantifiable value. Developing the domain expertise to provide business insights that help shape the customer’s buying vision can result in a more productive solution that generates better business results. This has a quantifiable value. And it is very memorable.