September 24, 2009

Sales as Secret Agents

One of the critical components of customerizing your marketing strategy is to go beyond understanding the needs of customers to discovering their secrets. This BE DiFFERENT Practise seeks to understand the deepest desires of those you have decided to SERVE and then to create Holistic Offers that reflect their uniqueness.

In Chapter Twenty-Four of my book I discuss several practical sources of customer secrets and in Chapter Fifty-Three I advocate that Sales should be held accountable for secret gathering given the strategic position they hold in an organization.

Sales are often in the best position to ask the right questions, LISTEN, record what they hear and report back to marketing. Yet they are rarely asked to perform this function. The world continues to be in the product flogging mode and as long as the salesperson understands the features and benefits of the product they are ok. The problem is they are like every other organization out there and have no opportunity to BE DiFFERENT.

Besides opening up additional marketing opportunities, secret gathering facilitates the relationship building process. After all if your salesperson takes the time to actually be interested enough to try to understand the customer at a deeper level they obviously care about them, right? You can’t ‘grin’ the customer by the way and fake that you actuality care. You will get caught and the customer will walk!

Build secret gathering into Sales performance plans. And ensure Sales compensation plans include it as well otherwise it won’t get done.Sales bonuses should assign a material weight to this component to get sales attention - I suggest at least 25% of the sales bonus should be based on secret gathering effectiveness.

Who decides how effective Sales is at secret gathering? THE CUSTOMER! Create a Customer Report Card detailing the sales behaviors you expect from the salesperson to exhibit when in the secret gathering mode. Then get the customer to rate the salesperson on each behavior on a one-to-five scale - ‘1’ says nothing is being done; ‘5’ says secret gathering is being done effectively and consistently.

Cheers, Roy Osing

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Institutionalize Customer Learning
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Discover Customer Secrets
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Posted 9.24.09 at 05:40 am by Roy Osing | Read Comments (0) | Leave a Comment