Episode #364: Do We Really Understand Client's Needs In Sales?

Understanding client’s needs presumes we care about what they want. For many salespeople this isn’t even a topic in their mind. Their understanding is that they turn up and tell the client all about their widget in microscopic detail and somehow the client will buy once they have all of that data. Now this approach may work with certain analytic personality types and certain professions, but it is still a sporadic approach with a low success rate. How do we know that what we are showing them will resonate with what they need?

I was interested in a certain solution and asked the President to send someone to me to explain more about it, after hearing his presentation. The Sales Manager for the firm came to see me. He didn’t ask me a single question, but went straight into a prepared slide presentation with about sixty slides. Japanese all look so young, but I guess he was in his forties, so he was not some green kid. He had been doing this sales approach for his whole career, over the last twenty years, I would guess.

Here is the problem with the spray and pray angle in sales. There were two slides out of the sixty, which I judged were interesting. He had wasted his time showing me 58 that were useless because he didn’t ask me what I wanted. If he had known, he could have gone straight to those two and we could have spent all of our time digging into how they would help me grow my business. Instead, he got nothing and left empty-handed.

Presuming we are salespeople who are professionals and so ask questions, are we sure we are finding out what we need to know? Our primary task is to draw an early conclusion concerning whether or not we have what the buyer needs. If not, then we should waste no more time and we should go find someone we can serve. If we can help them, then we need more detail to work out exactly how we can assist. We ask questions about their current situation to get an idea of where they are in their business at the moment.

We next ask them where they need to be and we measure the gap between these two points. If the distance is relatively small, there is the danger they think they can get there by themselves without anyone’s help. That is why we also ask about the timeline they have set for the achievement of their goals. We try to draw out the point that the market and their rivals are always moving quickly and they need to do the same. We need to create a sense of urgency.

Now we ask, if they know where they need to be, why aren’t they there now? What is holding them back? In their answer, we may find our solution may be a possible antidote to what is ailing them at the moment. Finally, we ask them what success for this project would mean for them personally. We do this because when we are explaining the solution, we want to tie it back to what they told us was in it for them.

All this is very good, but do we actually get answers to our questions which are useful? We remember that the person we are talking to will have to navigate a “yes” decision through the different divisions and sections within the firm. These are people who we will never meet and will never be able to question. That means we have to anticipate there will be opposition to doing something different or new within this client. We need to get some early insight into what the internal opposition will look like.

I was speaking to the President to a small company who was very enthusiastic about buying our solution and it would have been perfect for them. Nothing happened. I kept following up and kept getting excuses. What I realise now is that the CFO comes from the parent company and the President doesn’t have that much power. Now he won’t tell me that because it is embarrassing to be the President but unable to approve such a modest investment.

This is the issue we have as salespeople. We cannot know everything which is going on behind the client’s closed doors and we operate on the most sparse diet of information fed to us by our contact. Japanese companies are paranoid about secrecy and so often we are not told much at all, as they try to keep all their dirty laundry hidden away. This is especially the case when it comes to individuals who may block us internally.

We should keep asking, though. For example, “Inside your firm, I am sure this buying decision will interest some key groups. Thinking ahead to dealing with any concerns they might have, so that we can address them in advance, can you think of where there might be pockets of resistance to this idea we are proposing?”. We are trying to work out what information we need to provide to our champion, so that they can pass this on to these hidden groups and deal with any pushback. If we don’t do this, we may find we hit a brick wall and the deal never materialises for us.