Understanding your customers before you start selling.

Good morning everyone! Just a short post today to introduce an idea I think is very important to sales professionals of all types and that is to understand your customer’s needs before you start selling. I was reading Chris Whyatt Thinks and found a quote he used that I thought was very powerful: "If you want to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words." You should check out the rest of his post “My Favorite Quotation (in a sales context)” it has some great comments and I am sure Chris would love to hear what you think as well.

This post really got me thinking about The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and how it applies to sales. Anyone who knows me knows my favorite habit is “Habit #5 Seek first to understand then be understood”. Probably knows why I enjoyed Chris’s quote so much. It basically says the same thing in different words. Before we start selling it is imperative that we understand a customer, their needs and what it is they are trying to accomplish. My plan for next week is to start a series of 8 posts covering the 7 habits. It should be a fun series and I hope it will stimulate some interesting conversation. I will also be training my own sales team on the same topic so I hope to be sharing some of their thoughts and comments in that series as well.

If you are really interested in getting to understand your clients better and understand what makes people buy I suggest you check out Craig Elias’s blog Shift Selling where he focuses on trigger events and what causes people to buy. It is a great blog and he is focused on a very narrow topic, but it is one that affects all of us. A good post to start on is “What’s the BIG deal about “Trigger Events”.

I hope all of you have a great week this week! More to come in the next few days!

-Brad