What Customers Don’t Want From Agents
By John O’Hara
Youve been selling to your customers for so many years, you automatically know what theyre going to say before they say it. You know what questions theyre going to ask before you walk into their office. You are a selling guru and you can read your customers’ minds. You do this so well, that youve contemplated taking your superhuman mind reading talents and starting a side business! Right. … Earth to sales agent: Come on back to reality.
The problem with doing a sales job for so long is you think you know what your customers want. But more often than not, you dont. Even if you initially sold your customer based on their needs, you may have lost touch with what those needs are today. You think your recommendations are right, but they may not be. The best practices you learned early on in your career may no longer apply.
On your way to understanding what customers want, start with what they don’t. Let’s review.
9. Please they do not want you to sell them traditional voice services. Have you heard of VoIP or SIP? Voice is so “yesterday.” Wake up and smell the data. It’s time to move on. The majority of your customers projects can be addressed by some of the latest advanced data, such as cloud server, virtualization and managed hosting to name a few. Begin your customer conversations with ideas on how to improve their data network efficiencies.
8. Dont tell your customer theyre getting a smoking deal.” They know if they wait until the end of the month or quarter, youll drop your shorts with a better price. Leave the used car salesman shtick to the used car salesman.
7. Customers dont want to waste time. Were all doing more with less especially after the nightmarish recession weve been through. If youre meeting with the customer, bring value. They want to know about new technologies and services that can benefit them. Doing account reviews with them is nice, but make sure you also tell them about the latest and greatest network features, delivery models, hybrid hosting, etc. That may get and keep their attention!
6.When your customer’s current provider is purchased, dont lie to them about how the synergies between the two companies will benefit them. Come on, we all know thats a load of crap! Be honest and tell them there could be interruptions in carrier support and challenges integrating the disparate networks. Over-sharing in this case may be better than hiding the truth.
5. Dont be late for customer meetings. Its OK to be early and wait in the lobby. With the advent of computer tablets and smartphones, you can still email or text Aunt Sally about making it to Sunday dinner. Besides, making you wait makes your customer feel important.
4. Don’t kill them with a 40 slide presentation. If they want to know about the history of the company or how many customers a provider has, they’ll ask. If you have to whip out a presentation, keep it simple, stupid.
3. Dont bring in 20 members of the account team during your meeting. Your customer doesnt really want to meet the regional sales vice president, especially if theyre not contributing to the discussion.
2. Stop talking! Just listen. Nothings more annoying to your customer than an agent whos always talking and not giving them a chance to ask questions. Theres nothing wrong with a break in the conversation. I bet if you listen more, your customer will provide more detail about their projects than you were able to get from the prior four meetings combined.
And the No 1. thing customers DONT want from their sales agent is …
1. Dont invite them to a vendor lunch presentation. Do you really think a stale boxed lunch packed with an apple, chocolate chip cookie and Diet Coke along with two hours of boring presentations is worth their time?
John OHara is the principal of San Diego-based SE Solve Inc. SE Solve has more than 32 years combined experience in the solution/sales engineering field supporting channel partners and agents on designing and selling complex data technologies to their customers. Prior to SE Solve, O’Hara was the director of sales engineering for Internap Network Services and also a sales engineering manager at MCI. He can be reached at john@sesolve.com.
