Sales POP - Purveyors of Propserity
Building a Sales Team: Becoming Customer-Centric
Blog / Sales Management / Sep 1, 2015 / Posted by Nikolaus Kimla / 6540

Building a Sales Team: Becoming Customer-Centric

In my last blog, I discussed how difficult building a sales team can be, especially for a startup. Your sales reps need to be entrepreneurial-minded (what I call salespreneurs) in order to help get the company truly off the ground and headed toward success. Now let’s take a look at how these salespreneurs should focus their efforts.

Product Focus

Commonly a salesperson learns, in the main, about the products or services they are selling. When selling, they then relay all that they have learned to their prospects. They might throw in the marketing taglines as well, along with technical data—but the point is that they are focusing on the product.

If a sales team is really going to succeed, it must go well beyond this approach. Of course a salesperson must know their product backwards and forwards—but if a salesperson is mainly focused on the product, where does that leave the customer?

If you think about it, this has probably happened to you. You go out to purchase, let us say, an automobile. You’re in the showroom admiring a certain model. The salesman comes over and begins spilling out all kinds of facts and figures about that car: its mileage, its awards, its safety ratings. But beyond perhaps asking your name, that salesman doesn’t ask much about you, or your preference in cars, or your particular needs in a vehicle.

If this has happened to you, you probably noticed you didn’t feel very much like anyone was helping you at all. You mainly felt the pressure of being sold a car.

Customer-Centric

The first thing a salesperson should focus on is not the product—but the prospect. Especially with B2B buyers, who can have many complex reasons for seeking out a product or service, the salesperson needs to know why that buyer is looking at that particular product. What is happening in their company that has caused this search? How could such a product improve matters, and have an overall positive impact in the organization?

This approach is called customer-centric sales.

In such a scenario, let’s take a look at what a salesperson should be doing with all that product knowledge they’ve spent time absorbing.

  1. First, the sales rep should be doing little else but listening. When the salesperson talks, it should only to be asking questions, and then carefully noting the answers.
  2. Then, knowing the product as they do, the salesperson can then weave connections between facts that the prospect has given them, and features and functionality their product provides.
  3. If the product is indeed a good fit for that prospect, the salesperson will be able to utilize a majority of the factors the prospect has discussed to connect to product benefits—one to the other.

It is very much like weaving a tapestry in which threads are connecting between prospect issues and solutions provided by your product. That tapestry then provides a unified view for the prospect, of exactly how your product is going to help the prospect’s company.

For a prospect that has been conducting a considerable amount of product research and is now drowning in a sea of unconnected facts, this “tapestry” can bring considerable relief.

Such a conversation, by the way, can be very “un-sales like.” While still businesslike, it comes across more as a friend or acquaintance helping another. And if done right, it actually is.

The Right Tools

For a customer-centric approach, you need a CRM solution through which all the details of customer issues can be carefully tracked and followed up. Pipeliner, with its visual, intuitive functionality, not only makes it possible for a salesperson to rapidly record and save all such data, but also makes it instantly accessible when the salesperson is again in touch with that buyer.

So, build your sales team of salesprenuers. And right away, get them being customer-centric.

Find out how vital Pipeliner CRM is to your success! Get your free trial of Pipeliner CRM now.

Watch for the next in our series on Building a Sales Team.

About Author

CEO and partner of pipelinersales.com and the uptime ITechnologies, which I founded in 1994 and has since played a significant role in the development of the IT-environment. pipeliner is the most innovative sales CRM management solution on the market. Pipeliner was designed by sales professionals for sales professionals and helps close the gap between the requirements of C-level executives for transparency and the day-to-day operational needs of field and inside sales. I am also the founder and Initiator of the independent economic platform GO-AHEAD!, which orientates itself on the principles of a free marketplace in terms of liberal and social responsibility. Connecting people, the trust of business leadership in terms of values such as freedom, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurial spirit, and strengthening their awareness in order to create a dynamic boost within the economy triggered through spontaneity, all stand for the initial ideas surrounding GO-AHEAD! I studied in Los Angeles and Vienna and received my Masters's Degree in 1994. I am married and have 3 children My Specialties are in: Sales Management, Sales CRM Software, CRM Cloud Solutions, SAAS, Business Strategy, Software Development, "Pipeline Management", Social responsibility, outbound sales, b2b sales, inside sales, sales strategy, lead generation, sales process, entrepreneurship, coaching, mentoring, speaker, opportunity management, lead management, Austrian School of Economics

Author's Publications on Amazon

This is a practical manual covering the vital subject of Sales Management. I firmly believe that sales are the most important profession for dealing with today’s turbulent world and Econo my, for salespeople create wealth and produce peace. But salespeople need a competent, stable leader—and…
Buy on Amazon
Inside this eBook, you’ll discover a series of chapters dedicated to some of the most important areas facing sales today. From the sales process definition to measurement, lead generation, and proven sales techniques, this comprehensive eBook will provide you with the information you need to…
Buy on Amazon
A common term in sales today is EQ, which stands for “emotional I.Q.” It means the skill a salesperson has in reading emotions and utilizing them in sales. It means empathy and a number of other abilities. The short version is, it’s an I.Q. when…
Buy on Amazon
People are smart to question the future of automation, for it has become part of everything we do. With the quantity of applications and technology around us, we yet still crave more. We become convinced of its power when our package is delivered from Amazon…
Buy on Amazon
Sales management isn’t a simple subject by any means. But at the same time, it does have some basic and somewhat simple fundamentals—and that is what we are bringing to you with this book. First come pain points of sales management, and how to overcome…
Buy on Amazon
Today the Internet has transformed a seller's market into a buyer's market and author Nikolaus Kimla states that the role of sales has never been more crucial. It is now time to give salespeople the role they factually can play: entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They…
Buy on Amazon
This is our public declaration of the intentions behind Pipeliner, and our objectives and motives for the product and for our company. Behind the development of that CRM application and, in fact, behind everything we do, we have a real cause. The story begins with…
Buy on Amazon
For the future, there must be a perfect balance of humans and technology. You have to have the perfect technology, andthen the perfect human being in application, performance and presentation. Today and into the future, it’s a 50-50 balance. In the past it was perhaps…
Buy on Amazon
The salespreneur is based on the concept of the entrepreneur. Before we can explain the salespreneur, you have to have some understanding of the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur plays a crucial role in any economic system. The entrepreneur seeks out information that can be utilized for…
Buy on Amazon
A seasoned captain would never leave port without a competent navigator. In a similar way, a sales manager might be a total ace at "commanding the ship" – at inspiring and coaching sales reps, pointing out and getting agreement on making quotas, and keeping everyone's…
Buy on Amazon
..
..
.
Sales Process Automation
.
This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. For information on cookies and how you can disable them, visit our privacy and cookie policy.