Think Like Your Customer: A Winning Strategy to Maximize Sales by Understanding and Influencing How and Why Your Customers Buy: A Winning Strategy to Maximize Sales By Understanding and Influencing How and Why Your Customers Buy

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PART I

WHY CUSTOMERS BUY

CHAPTER 1

What Customers Think About

When I was a kid, I loved to go fishing with my dad. We always had a lot of fun. The only thing that wasn’t very fun about it was that he could normally catch fish all day long and I couldn’t catch anything. Well, as a nine-year-old kid I could get pretty frustrated, and it usually wasn’t long before I resorted to my standard incessant question, What am I doing wrong? What am I doing wrong? His advice was always the same. He said, Son, if you want to catch a fish, you have to think like a fish. I remember being even more frustrated then because, I’m not a fish! I didn’t know how to think like a fish. Besides, I reasoned, how could the way that I think influence what a fish does or doesn’t do?

As I got a little older I began to understand what my dad was really trying to say to me. What he meant was I needed to learn to think about what fish think about. So, I decided to do some reading and research. I went to the library and found some books on fish. I subscribed to several fishing magazines, and I even joined the local bass fishing club and started attending the monthly meetings. I learned all kinds of things.

Did you know that a fish is a cold-blooded animal? Therefore, fish are very sensitive to water temperature, and generally speaking they would rather be in warmer water as opposed to colder water when they can. Water is usually warmer in direct sunlight than in the shade, but fish don’t have any eyelids and the sun hurts their eyes. Shallow water is usually warmer than deep water, and it tends to hold a wide variety of food sources. But even if there is adequate cover (a boat dock or a thick growth of lily pads), so that they feel safe moving into the shallows, fish always position themselves so they can quickly escape to deeper water to avoid predators or threats of any kind. As I took the time to learn and understand more about all the different things that concern fish, I became much more effective at finding and catching them.

Later on, when I entered the business world, I remember hearing my first boss say, Although we each have different titles and responsibilities here in this company, we are really all in sales. We all need to think like salespeople. I also started attending sales seminars and I read a number of books on sales. They all seemed to revolve around the thought, Here’s the way top salespeople think. I appreciate the point that my former boss and those trainers and authors were trying to make, but it didn’t completely make sense. My dad never once said, "If you want to catch a fish you need to think like a fisherman. What he said was, You need to think like a fish."

In my work as a speaker and trainer in the field of sales performance and business profitability, I teach business professionals, and especially those in sales, to quit thinking like salespeople. What we all need to do is to start thinking more like customers! Admittedly, this is not always the most natural thing to do.

As I built my own professional career, I managed to work my way into a very uncomfortable position. I had sought out opportunities to sell enterprise-wide solutions and long-term services engagements with price tags in six and seven figures in order to maximize my own income potential. But because of the cost and the scope of the things that I sold, I had no choice but to deal with business owners and senior executives. This meant I often had to engage people twice my age—some of whom made more money every month than I made in a year—and help them arrive at my conclusions.

It quickly became glaringly apparent that if I was going to be effective dealing with, for example, the chief financial officer (CFO) of a major corporation, then I was going to have to think like a CFO. And for me that was a problem. I didn’t know how to think like a CFO, because I had never been one. But in time, with determination and a ton of personal effort, I did learn to think about what CFOs think about. And so can you. This book will show you how.

Your Customer’s World

With the exception of those who make their living as purchasing agents or secret shoppers, most people aren’t professional customers. Rather, they are professional engineers, accountants, human resource managers, customer service reps, chief executive officers (CEOs), or whatever. They spend their time thinking about the things that are most important to them and to the people they care about, are responsible for, and accountable to. They think about family issues, the weather, where to go for lunch, an upcoming sports event, or whichever global calamity dominated the morning news. While they’re at work they also spend at least part of their time thinking about their jobs, their responsibilities, and their objectives, as well as the expectations and obligations placed on them by themselves and others.

While there is no way we can know everything our customers are thinking about, one thing is relatively certain: they’re not spending a whole lot of time sitting around thinking about being our customer. In fact, dealing with vendors and suppliers is considered by many to be somewhat of a pain. Even those who frequently deal with outside vendors typically see it as a means to an end, and unless they work in procurement, it is just one of the many hats they wear each day.

Your customers, or those you hope soon will be, are busy. They are deluged with correspondence of every kind. They’ve got 150 e-mails in their inbox, eleven unplayed voice-mail messages, and a stack of papers on their desk that need to be dealt with ASAP. No wonder when we call it seems as if we are interrupting them. We are!

Imagine for a moment that you are one of the executives on your prospect list. What are some of the things that might occupy your mind? If you were in their position, would you make the time to take a phone call from a salesperson you didn’t know? A general manager who attended one of our workshops recently shared his perspective with the team. He said, Sometimes I do end up talking to salespeople on the phone … when I’m expecting a call from someone else and I accidentally pick up the wrong line.

Our customers (or clients) really aren’t that much different than we are. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that if we spend most of our day thinking about how to keep our boss happy and how to take better care of our customers, our clients probably spend most of their day thinking about how to keep their boss happy and how to take better care of their customers? If we could figure out how to help them do that, and then communicate to them that we could, we might find a lot less resistance.

At some point in my career, I came to the realization that …

In the business world, everybody has customers—those who buy, use, or benefit from whatever it is we produce or deliver—and serving our customers is the most important thing we do.

For those of us in professional sales, our customers are the people outside our company who buy what we sell. But for many people in a corporate setting—whether department managers or individual contributors—their customer is their boss or some other internal customer who buys whatever they produce at a predetermined contract rate (a salary) and then uses that work product to serve and satisfy yet other internal customers within their company.

A design engineer’s customer might be the manufacturing department that uses his blueprint as a guide to making a new product or component. The accounting department’s customers are the various internal or external consumers of the financial data, reports, and analyses that they produce. The CEO’s customers are the shareholders who buy a little piece of the company (i.e., shares of stock) based on the promise of favorable returns, which they hope will result in dividends and/or an increase in the value of each share of stock.

Learning to Think Like Your Customer requires each of us to look beyond how we interact with, deliver value to, and serve our own customers. We have to begin to think about how our customers, in turn, interact with, deliver value to, and serve their customers, whoever they may be. Only then can we truly begin to see ourselves the way our customers see us and understand how the products and services we bring to market can impact and add value to our customer’s world.

A Partnership

Just about every company and every sales leader I meet and work with tells me, We want our clients to think of us as more than just a vendor. We want to build strong partnerships with our clients. You know what? Your clients want that too! They wish somebody would come along who could help them identify the business problems that are keeping them from reaching their goals, help them determine which ones are the right problems to solve, and then roll up his sleeves and help them to achieve their desired business results.

Partnering with customers is not complicated, because …

The essence of partnership is working together toward a common goal or objective.

Building a vendor-client partnership is based on working together with our customer toward the common goal of better serving their customers. We do this by helping them to deliver higher-quality products and services, faster and more cost-effectively than their competition. Selling something is actually a small part of it. In fact, if that’s all we want to do, our customer will probably smell it a mile away. Buyers have a sense of discernment—to varying degrees, of course—but they can usually tell whether we are there to help them or to help ourselves.

Despite our good intentions, and our desire to follow the advice of author Stephen Covey, who said, Seek first to understand, and then to be understood, many of us have been conditioned to start every introductory meeting with a quick overview of, Who we are and what we do.¹ The truth is, our prospective customers are far more interested in who they are and what they do. We’d probably be better off if we quit trying to impress them with facts about us and instead impress them with what we have taken the time to learn about them.

What if we stopped talking about what we do long enough to learn a little more about what they do and how they do it? What if we took the time to find out what their customers have been asking them for lately, or what they think their customers could really benefit from, but they haven’t yet figured out how to deliver? If we could brainstorm together about how we could help them to better serve their customers, or how we could help them better compete with their competitors, then partnering with us would be the only sensible thing to do.

To be perceived as more than just another vendor who will probably end up wasting their time, we will have to behave entirely differently than the other twenty-two vendors who will call them that day. We will have to come to the table with more than a glossy brochure and an elevator pitch.

If we want to build strong partnering relationships with our clients and earn access to decision makers and senior executives—such as those at the C-Level (CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, etc.)—we should start by investing the time to learn more about their world, their business, their goals and objectives, as well as the obstacles standing in their way of achieving them. Only then can we effectively articulate how our products and services can enable them to reach those goals and objectives, be more competitive in the marketplace, and produce more business value.

One of the most important truths of selling, which we must accept and should constantly remind ourselves of, is …

Nobody wants to buy what you sell. What they want are the business results they can achieve by utilizing what you sell to pursue their own goals and objectives.

Most of the things that you and I sell are not ends unto themselves. More often they are a means to an end. To develop a well-rounded understanding of your customer’s business and the ends they are trying to accomplish, you’ll probably have to talk to and interview several people who work there. Once we do earn access and get in front of a decision maker, we can’t afford to waste their time or ours. We should start by doing some research before we even ask for the appointment. In the next section, we will look at some of the things we can learn before our first meeting with our customer.

Your Customer’s Business

Some of the best resources from which to learn about your customer’s business are the various corporate reports that all publicly traded companies, and many private companies, produce and make available to the public. By reading key sections of these documents, you can get an overview of your customer’s business model, their high-level business strategy, their primary goals and objectives, and even some of the tactics they intend to employ to pursue these goals and objectives. The more you know about their business, the more likely you’ll be to ask intelligent questions that lead to productive conversations.

Not too many years ago, it took a fair amount of time and effort to find and review enough information on a company to provide a good understanding of their business. Today, it’s as close as your laptop. To make the most of this book, I’d like to encourage you to select a target prospect account, preferably one that is publicly held, so you can easily get plenty of information about the business.

If you sell only to privately held companies, see if you can find one of your prospect’s direct competitors that is publicly traded to use as your case study account. You’ll still be able to gather a lot of information about the market your customer competes in, as well as what particular challenges they are likely to face from their direct competitors.

Go to your target prospect’s website and find the Investor Relations section, which is usually under About Us. You’ll probably see subheadings such as Management Team, Mission, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), Stock Performance, Press Releases, and so on. All of them are worth review, but there are a few documents in particular that you’ll want to look at closely. Take a minute to download or print the following documents:

1. The most recent Annual Report

2. The most recent SEC Form 10-K

3. The 3–5 most recent press releases

4. The 3–5 most recent news articles

1. The Annual Report

An Annual Report is a collection of corporate information and financial reports that most publicly held companies release approximately ninety days after the close of their fiscal year. The first page or two of most Annual Reports features a Letter to the Shareholders from the chairman of the board or CEO. This letter acts as an executive summary to the rest of the report and is a great place to start your research. In it, they normally provide a quick snapshot of the company’s performance over the past year as compared to previous years. It also often contains the outlook for the future and sometimes offers details about the company’s primary objectives, their plans for the future, and how senior management intends to carry them out.

Many companies’ Annual Report takes on the look and feel of a sales brochure. That makes sense, because its primary purpose is to educate and inform investors who might want to buy their stock. It can also be a great resource for the sales professional who’ll take the time to read it. You can normally learn about the relative performance of the various divisions or segments of their business, as well as some of their initiatives surrounding quality, safety, and corporate citizenship.

The Annual Report also contains at least the three primary financial reports: Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows. Learning to read and understand these key financial statements, as well as knowing exactly how you can impact your customer’s financial results, is a vitally important skill-set for selling business solutions. In Chapter 4, we will look more closely at how what we sell translates into economic business value.

If you have a financial background, or have learned how to read financial statements in college, you will have an edge on those salespeople who do not. Either way, don’t get bogged down trying to analyze all the numbers. Just catch the spirit of what is being communicated. As you browse the Annual Report, what you want to learn are the answers to several general questions:

• Is this company growing and investing for the future? Are they just trying to hold on? Or are they losing ground in the marketplace and/or downsizing?

• Is this company expanding into new product lines and new markets? Or are they divesting (selling off) certain segments of their business to become more focused and streamlined?

• Are they making money and profit? Or are they losing money?

• If you owned or were managing this business, would you be excited and likely to embrace change and take chances on new ideas? Or would you be hunkering down, cutting back, and avoiding risk however possible?

• If you had some money to invest, would this be a good company to invest in?

The answers to these kinds of questions can give you an indication of how receptive your prospective client might be to the kinds of business solutions you bring to the table. It can also give you an idea of their appetite for investment in new business processes and technologies designed to support and propel growth, contain or drive down costs, or help them accomplish more with less infrastructure.

Don’t forget to look in the very back of the Annual Report, where you will normally find a list of the senior officers and the board of directors. This is a great resource with which to begin constructing an organization chart that shows the various people you will likely need to interface with during your sales campaign. Make particular note of any executive biographies that may mention where these executives used to work. They might have come from another company that has experience with your company, either good or bad. Also, note any members of the board of directors who happen to work for companies that might already be on your company’s client list.

2. The Form 10-K

An even better source for detailed corporate information than the Annual Report is a document that all publicly held companies are required to complete and file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) within ninety days of the close of each fiscal year. It’s what the SEC calls a Form 10-K. If for some reason your case study account doesn’t post their latest Form 10-K on their website, you can get it from the Securities and Exchange Commission website (www.sec.gov). You can query for it in the section called EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval).

Companies tend to be far more forthcoming in the 10-K report than in the glossy Annual Report. They have to be. There is a standard format in which the SEC requires companies to disclose a broad variety of information to current and potential shareholders, which includes details about the company’s financial performance, all properties owned by the corporation, any pending legal actions they may be faced with, as well as any potential threats or exposures to risk that management believes could substantially impact the company’s ability to achieve its stated objectives.

This report contains a wide variety, and often an overwhelming quantity, of financial reports. Here again, don’t get bogged down by the numbers. Invest most of your time in Part I, Item 1, which contains what the SEC calls a narrative description of the business. Companies are given some leeway in the presentation of this information, but topics common to many 10-K reports