In this Expert Insight Interview, Gen Furukawa discusses how to better understand prospect/customer problems and provide a solution that meets their needs. Gen Furukawa is part of the Prehook team and loves helping entrepreneurs build awesome e-commerce brands.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- What it takes to understand your customers and prospects
- How to get prospects to share information willingly
- The trick to coming up with the right “hook”
Understanding the Customer
Understanding the customer is a perennial problem when it comes to sales. There are many issues when it comes to getting to the heart of the customer’s problem, and Gen Furukawa says that the solution to most of these problems is asking questions.
Asking prospects about their goals and challenges is the key. Once you understand this, you can think about how your product and brand can take them from their current state to their future aspirational state.
Adding Value
Salespeople are geared towards understanding customer pain points, but when it comes to e-commerce, marketing, and other scaling endeavors, understanding these customer challenges becomes far less intuitive because it could be any number of problems they’re trying to solve. That said, asking a few questions can help you quickly get to the bottom of the problem.
The crux of it is about adding value. Most consumers are willing to share their information, but there has to be some value in the exchange. That value is often translated to personalized experiences. If you can better understand your customer, you can offer more relevant messaging, content, and more relevant offers.
Asking Questions
Part of the challenge is constructing your offer to make sense to your customer and build upon itself. Prospects should see the value in giving you additional information. The trick is to get the right “hook” in there, targeting the things that help your customers learn more about themselves or pique their curiosity enough to click through, whether on a homepage or a paid ad, to eventually land on your site.
The end goal is to ask a few questions and gather data that the customer willingly shares so that you can understand what they’re looking for, why they’re on the site, and what problems they’re looking to solve.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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