I got a LinkedIn message today from a great sales person. It was intended to be a humorous and fun comment, ” The only reason why I don’t click ‘like’ or comment your posts is just I would like to avoid that my customers can see that I am searching for new ways to convince them 😃 “
I deeply appreciated the comment and chuckled reading it. But on refection, I responded: ” 😉 Here’s a different point of view. Everything I write about is focused on helping customers succeed and grow. Through that, we succeed. Don’t you want your customers to know that you are doing everything you can to help them succeed? 😉 “
We should be unapologetic about our drive to help our customers succeed, improve, grow, and achieve their dreams.
We can and should be relentless in helping them identify opportunities to better achieve their goals and to increase their success.
We create the most value with our customers when we are driven by those things that help them improve. But this isn’t a charitable act, we must achieve our goals, producing the orders and revenue our companies expect.
Somehow we forget these goals aren’t incompatible, that they are actually very aligned and shared. Our job is to find, engage, and work with customers who have the problems/challenges/opportunities that we are the best in the world at solving. We must be driven to help them understand how to address those problems, improving their ability to grow and succeed.
Things go off the rails when we lose sight of this. When we focus only on our success and goals, forgetting what the customer needs to achieve and why it’s important to them, we fail. We are making the process about us and not about the customer.
When we blindly chase opportunities where we aren’t the best at solving the customer problems, when we focus on our own goals, when we don’t understand what the customer is trying to achieve and how we contribute; we are wasting the customer’s time and ours.
Helping our customers succeed keeps us viciously focused on those we can help and want help. Helping them succeed is the most effective way for us to succeed.
Afterward: Thanks for provoking the idea for this post Marco!
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