Sometimes, I feel like a broken record talking about Customer and Business Acumen. Speaking to sales enablement executives, fewer than 10% have any sort of business acumen programs in place.
When I talk to leaders about their GTM strategies, the focus is on products and presenting the capabilities of products. Yet these same leaders complain about the ability to connect to prospects and customers.
It’s disappointing, but the majority of sellers I speak with can’t answer anything but the most basic questions about their customers and their businesses. I ask:
- “How does your customer make money?” The usual response is, “They sell stuff….” Sometimes they even know what the company sells. But then I ask again, “How does your customer make money,” few can provide any deeper understanding of what their customers (as enterprises) do to make money.
- “What work does your customer do?” This time I’m referring to individuals in the enterprise. People respond, “They run IT, they manage sales, they design new products, they are marketing people…” But then when I ask, “What’s that mean? How are they measured, who do they depend on, who depends on them, what are the biggest challenges they face in doing their job, …….” people struggle. Sometimes they can answer a few of these questions, but pretty soon they go silent. They don’t know.
- Then I ask, “What does [Insert the name of a human being] care about?” Usually it’s crickets. If there is an answer, it’s something about the products being sold, because that’s what we care about and the focus of our conversations with those individuals. But it’s not what the individuals really care about.
We struggle to connect with our customers. Customers don’t want to talk to us, they look for other alternatives to learn about potential solutions. They don’t respond to our outreach, and when they don’t respond, we ratchet up the volumes of the same messages.
We are trained, expertly, to talk about what we want to talk about. But we don’t know how to talk to the customer about what they care about. And we are surprised when customer prefer a rep-free buying experience.
And what’s so perplexing is the moment we start talking to the customer about them, their business, their roles, and what they care about, things change profoundly! Customers (actually all of us) are hungry for these conversations. I don’t have to go through the explanations of this because each of us experience the same things. Our worlds are complex, we face accelerating change, we face increasing uncertainty, we are confused, we feel isolated, we are exhausted.
When someone expresses interest in us, who we are, what’s important to us, what we want to achieve, we engage. When we encounter someone who listens, empathizes, and cares, we respond.
When our managers don’t care, when they don’t seek to understand, when they don’t seek to help and develop us, regardless of how well we may be compensated, we look for something else. When all our managers care about is the numbers, and not who we are, we disengage.
Our customers are no different, yet for some reason we have decided to treat them very differently, to engage them very differently. (Hmm, somehow the phrase, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you….” is echoing in the background of my mind.”)
Surprisingly, we don’t know how to talk to our customers about what they care about. We haven’t been trained in how to do this, we don’t get coaching in how to do this. We are scripted and measured on our ability to execute those scripts, not our ability to create meaning with customers–and other human beings.
Customer acumen is so simple. It’s making things all about the person you are trying to engage. It’s starts with curiosity, empathy, caring and building trust.
We extend our customer acumen with business acumen. This helps us understand what these individuals face in their jobs, and companies. Understanding their businesses—their specific job, their functional responsibilities, their business performance, their competition, their performance in their markets, opportunities to improve performance, opportunities to change and grow.
Our customers are struggling, just as we often struggle. But because we talk to 100’s of people in similar roles, similar functions, similar industries, we can share those experiences as customers think about changes they might make. We can help them learn how to most effectively address the issues, how to manage the risks, what they should be paying attention to. We can help guide them through a process they have seldom been through before.
Now some of you may be thinking, “That’s all great, in an ideal world, but we have to make our numbers! It seems this takes a huge amount of time that we don’t have!”
Here’s the big secret that sellers who have great customer and business acumen don’t want to share. They don’t want to share it because it sets them and their results apart from everyone else. Here it is in three bullets:
- Win rates skyrocket! We’ve seen win rates more than double. It’s understandable, we are building deep understanding, relationships and trust with the customers. They gain greater confidence through the work with us, and are most likely to want to continue doing that work.
- No decision made plummets! Today we accept over 60% of committed buying efforts fail, primarily because of FOMU/FOFU. Working closely with customers, guiding them through the process and building their confidence reduces no decision made.
- Buying cycles reduce by 30-40%!
The answers to capturing prospect and customer interest are so obvious, yet for unexplained reasons, we consistently ignore them.
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