What If We Sold The Way Our Customers Want To Buy?

Calm down, give me a few moments to defend my case. I know it’s an absurd concept–selling the way our customers want to buy. Afterall, we have our quotas. We have our cadences, sequences, we have to reach out to hundreds or thousands of people a day, we have to constantly be pitching. We have to fill our pipelines, we have to move prospects through our process, we have to move them to a fast decision.

We have our process, we have to execute it, we have to produce results! Don’t slow us down, we have work to do.

Yet, this work is, increasingly, not working. We aren’t producing the results we need to produce, so our solution is to do more, work harder, expand our outreach. We study new programs, we leverage new tools, we look at new techniques.

It’s surprising to me. I don’t read of anyone doing the market research, no projects, where we go to our customers, asking questions, “How do you want to buy? How can we be most helpful when you are looking to buy? Where do you struggle the most? What should we stop doing? What should we be doing that we currently aren’t doing? How do we help you make your buying process easier?”

We see the evidence every day. As I’ve mentioned, what we currently do continually produces poorer results than in the past.

We see buyer behavior changing, in the past several years, we’ve seen the number of buyers preferring rep free buying experiences has almost doubled. At the same time, we see continued high levels of regret expressed by those buyers is very high. We see increasing volumes of customers failing to make a decision and implement a change.

For years, customers have been telling us: “You don’t understand our business or our problems! You waste our time! You don’t understand your products and, specifically, what value we will get!”

Yet, for some reason, we keep doing what we have always done, and, in the process, we seem to be driving buyers to search for new alternatives to buying.

What if we called a time out, what if we sat down with our customers and instead of focusing on what we want to sell, started talking about how they buy and how they want to be sold to.?

We might look at past purchases, asking things, “Other than the product fit, what did you find helpful in your buying experience? What things did the vendor do that were really helpful? What things did they do to waste your time and should have been stopped? What did you wish you had known in making the decision?”

In some of the interviews we have done for clients, it’s amazing how willing they are to provide insights on the tactical activities sellers undertake; “What could sellers do to be better prepared? How do they use your time more effectively? How do they learn about your goals and challenges more effectively? How would you like to learn about new approaches and solutions? What prospecting outreaches do you respond to? What would cause you to want to meet with a salesperson, how would a salesperson arrange a meeting?”

These seem obvious, but how often to we ask buyers about these things?

We do endless analysis of the data, and it tells us the same things, what we currently do is neither helpful nor working. We even can assess what may be wrong–it isn’t relevant, it isn’t personalized…… We have research that tells us buying trends and issues.

But, somehow, we never talk to prospects and customers to ask them about their experiences, how they want to buy, what would be most helpful.

I know it seems like heresy to talk to customers about our engagement processes and how we could be most helpful. After all, aren’t we supposed to be selling?

But perhaps we can learn from other functions in the company. Product planners and developers constantly talk to customers about their current and evolving needs. We create experiments with customers to test new capabilities and to learn with them. We study market and other research to understand trends, market disruptions, changes. We analyze use data, product failures, returns. We involve customers in our product/solution planning processes. We seek direct feedback about what they need, we help them think about needs they haven’t yet discovered, assessing their reactions.

Product developers spend a lot of time doing product, customer market research. They’ve coined the phrase, “Voice of the customer,” as a mechanism to drive their product development processes.

What if we started thinking about the “Voice of the customer,” in our selling engagement processes? What if we actually engaged them in understanding, learning, then responding based on what we have learned? In the old days, we used to have things called “customer councils.” In addition to reviewing product plans, ideas and directions, one of the most powerful things they provided was insight on how they wanted to be sold to. Those seem to be a thing of the past, I seldom see sellers asking customers these questions.

But if we did ask, we might actually sell in a way our customers want to buy. Maybe they would actually want to engage with us to move forward.

Of course, any concept of asking our customers these things, somehow seems like heresy.