13 April 2009 | brian

It’s easy for a sales organization to get blinded by all the issues they have to deal with. Sales performance metrics, reviews, changing policies, and new roll-outs tempt individuals to focus inward, on themselves and the others inside the sales team. Your customers have their own troubles. They don’t care about your metrics or the amazing new offerings you might be rolling out. Their focus is firmly on serving their own clients and customers, and tackling the challenges they face. If you want to close the deal, you have to take the time to see the situation from their perspective.

The truth is, your clients are selfish, and they need to be. They thrive only so long as they fulfill their customers’ needs. They don’t have time to learn about your product, so you have to take the time to learn how it can make life easier for them. Successful sales organizations focus on solutions-led sales 26% more often than their competition. In their 2009 Best Practices survey, Miller Heiman found that 93% of the most successful sales organizations reported that they clearly understood their customers’ issues before proposing a solution, as opposed to 50% overall. By taking the time to understand the customers’ situations, these teams are able to find ways their products solve their customers’ problems. Sometimes this requires flexibility and creativity. A drowning man might not have much interest in keeping his beer cold, but if your cooler also floats, you’ve got yourself a sale.

Once you’ve become an integral part of your customer’s business, it’s important to maintain that relationship. 89% of the best sales organizations report that they jointly set long-term objectives with their strategic accounts as compared to only 36% across all organizations surveyed, and 91% said their organizational structure allows them to easily adapt to their customers’ changing needs, as apposed to 36% overall. Keeping the focus on fulfilling the client’s needs cements you as a regular part of their processes.

Serving your clients might not be something the sales team can handle on their own. “Sales is no longer the total fiefdom of the sales function,” says Damon Jones, President and Managing Director of International for Miller Heiman. “It’s now the responsibility of a much broader part of the organization. The focal point of customer relationships increasingly involves people from across departments.” Again, though, it’s important to keep the perspective of these other people in mind. They may know this client is important to the company, but unlike members of the sales organization, they may not have done the research necessary to really understand the customer’s needs and they haven’t spent time forming a relationship with the people. They don’t want to screw things up, but they also might not have the people skills that sales teams thrive on. Before they can help your customers, they’re going to need a hand from you first. Having standardized systems in place for cooperation between departments goes a long way toward easing anxieties and making things work smoothly. “Having systems and processes and standard ways for managing customer relationships really helps because it puts everyone on the same page,” Jones notes. “If you have a common way for how you talk to customers, you can strategize around key customer relationships. People from other departments can participate and support and really understand what the lead sales rep or account manager is trying to accomplish.”

The key remains rising above the daily challenges in your own organization and seeing from the perspective of others. It takes time and research to understand the world from another’s point of view, but the insights gained are necessary for world-class sales performance.

Photo credits: Hamed Saber, zoniedude1