Understanding Your Customer

Is your sales team taking the time to truly understand your customer?

Sales, in one form or another, is as old as humanity itself. People have been exchanging goods or purchasing services since the dawn of civilization.

And while sales has gone through substantial changes in the last few decades alone, one thing has remained consistent: it’s always been, and always will be, about filling the needs or solving the problems of someone else.

Therefore, understanding your customer should always be a pillar in your sales process.

Not only does your entire organization need to understand your customer type, in order to build products and offer services that make a difference and continue to innovate, but each individual salesperson in the organization needs to understand the individual needs of the people they’re trying to sell to.

Let’s face it, if you’re making sporting goods, your sales won’t do too well if your reps are attempting to sell soccer balls to basketball players. This is a simple analogy which holds an extremely important and critical lesson: understand your customer!

Salesperson is seeking their ideal customer

Here are a few questions both your organization and individual sales reps can be asking to get a clearer picture:

  1. What problem does your product or service solve?
  2. Who is most likely to experience the problem your offering solves?
  3. How often do they experience this problem and how can you structure your offering to accommodate this frequency?
  4. What professional positions do your customers or clients most often hold?
  5. Where, geographically, are they most likely to reside?
  6. How old is your ideal customer?
  7. What are your ideal customer’s interests?
  8. What is this particular customer’s most critical need that you must ensure is solved?
  9. What timeline does your customer need their problem solved, or progressed by?

I could go on.

The point here is to ensure that both your organization and your reps have a clear picture of who they’re selling to! Without this clarity, your sales process can never be truly efficient or effective on a longterm basis.