Hello and thanks for visiting.
As most salesmen know, to make a sale you have to carefully follow the steps of the sales process. If you don’t, you ruin the sale.
In the presentation and process I feel that the needs analysis is the most important but also the most important.
It is where you figure out what problems the customer faces, what goals they have, what they think about the product or service they are using and what value they feel it generates.
When you boil down all the information you get from the needs analysis what you have learned is what does the customer want from your type of product, what problems they are facing today and what points you can use later in the process to push the customer over the edge.
It is also in the needs analysis that you build most of the rapport with the customer.
So, how do you do it?
Before you start asking questions it is very important that you have a clear image of what you want to accomplish. You don’t want to know everything about the customer and not everything about their business.
It is true that the more you know the better it is, but you don’t have to go searching for lots of extra information. Keep your questions on topic and let the customer guide you into other subjects if they feel it is important that you know about those problems and areas.
Some of the best salesmen are so prepared for the needs analysis that they have a typed up list of the questions they plan to ask and at the start of the meeting hand it to the customer saying “this is what I plan on asking you today so I can make sure I present you with the best possible solution”.
This level of preparedness is one you should have as well. Any customer faced with this salesman will be very impressed and usually pleased to answer all the questions, just like the salesmen they want to know what the best possible solution for them is.
Once you have started asking your customers questions it is important that you really listen.
Make sure they see you are focused, lean forward and ask follow up questions. Make them feel important and that the information they are giving you will help you present them with a perfect solution for them.
A detail many miss is to ask if they have understood everything right.
Before you move onto the product presentation I like to ask:
“So to sum everything up, you are facing these problems, you hope for these solutions, you feel that this type of product would bring so and so much value to your company and that you would like to find a vendor that could present you with a product that solves these issues?”
This really shows the customer that you have listened and that you have respected what they told you. Even if you get it wrong, it just proves that you cared enough to ask so that they can correct you.
Once you have created this rapport and know all you need to know you can move onto the product presentation and start moving the customer towards the sale.
What a difference a proper analysis can do!
Just to give you and example of how big a difference a good needs analysis can do.
About 2 years ago I was running kind of low on new leads.
I had been working very hard to contact as many customers as possible and had contacted more customers than we were finding leads.
I decided to call a few customers who didn’t match our exact target profile for our customers (something I usually advice against, but like I said, I had no other leads).
Most of the customers where really too small to be able to really profit from our service.
One customer looked like they wouldn’t need our service ever but on a bet with a colleague I called anyway and started talking to their CEO.
She was very kind and we booked a meeting.
The next day I came into their office, just like I had feared it was a small office with only 2-3 people their.
We started talking and I started asking my planned questions.
The longer we talked, the more wrong my initial theory had been.
It turned out that this company, although small (it turned out that they had about 30 employees, so a lot more than I thought, but still small), had a real need for our services.
We kept talking and when I presented my suggestion she jumped at it and for the last 3 years she has been my most profitable customer.
If you have any stories of when a thorough needs analysis has made a difference for you, please leave a comment below and share it with the rest of us.
//Daniel
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