Customer advocacy, the new sales paradigm.

For anyone in business today the customer is not just King, customers are the very reason why their company exists at all. But, unlike the early 20th century mantra: ‘the customer is always right’, many of today’s marketers have modified that mindset to: ‘only the right customer is always right’. Enabling this mindset is a wealth of customer data and a proliferation of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. Never before have so many (companies) known so much (information) about so many (people).

Just about every organisation with a product or service to sell has developed a CRM-type database containing mountains of information, some of it irrelevant, on their current customers, their potential customers and even their competitors’ customers. Unfortunately, as often happens when there is too much information, it becomes difficult to manage and hard to extract real commercial value. Many organisations have invested heavily in CRM solutions only to find that their bottom line has not delivered the return on investment (ROI) they were expecting.

Objectives

Business to business and business to consumer markets all have the same basic objective – to increase revenue through continued and incremental business.

But all the metrics and customer profiling in the world won’t replace the most important aspect of selling in today’s customer savvy market – knowing what the customer really wants. We’ve all heard the old saying ‘it’s not what you know but who you know …’ but that only scratches the surface. More critical is how much you know about who you know and how relevant that knowledge is to their intention to purchase.

Whilst most CRM applications attempt to provide these insights, they overlook one major factor which is particularly relevant in the B2B market: companies don’t buy things, people do. And people would rather buy from someone they like; someone who understands their needs and is willing to listen to their concerns. As Stephen R. Covey said in his excellent 1990 book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: ‘seek first to understand – then be understood’. What Covey was saying is that, before you start pitching your products and services, you better find out what the customer really needs.

Many so-called sales professionals who sell products and services or even intangibles like concepts, learnt that critical to their success was their ability to close the sale. What many never learnt however, was how to correctly open the sale in the first place.

Aligning the process

What the successful companies have discovered is that they will only succeed in closing deals if they have correctly aligned the selling process with the buying process.

One way to achieve this alignment is through the application of OPEN selling. The term is an acronym which stands for, ‘ Opportunity, Pain, Expectation and Need’. When applied to a potential sales opportunity OPEN selling imposes important disciplines on the seller that ensures the sales process is aligned to the buying process. It is a collaborative process of identifying and understanding the potential customer’s real needs and expectations. It is the proven way to create a WIN-WIN scenario for the buyer and the seller. It’s about becoming the customer advocate.

By placing themselves in the buyer’s shoes and seeing the issues from the buyer’s perspective, a true sales professional can increase their success rate. A customer advocate takes the concerns and issues of a customer back into their organisation in an attempt to find an appropriate and commercially viable solution. For example, if the seller’s company only makes square pegs and the client only has round holes to fill, a customer advocate can soon identify whether or not it is commercially viable for his company to start making round pegs. This customer advocacy approach is the new way for companies to sell because, in today’s competitive world, it’s the new way that buyers are buying.

Written by:

Bob Pritchard has extensive experience in strategic issues management, corporate reputation management, investor relations, and government relations, and has worked with the senior management teams of some of Australia’s leading companies. bob.pritchard@communecom.com.au

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