6 Ways To Stop Selling And Get More Customers Buying

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1. Get the view from the customer early by talking to real people. With interactive social media and customers anxious to provide input, companies no longer need expensive customer panels and market research to get a true customer perspective. It’s important to do this early and continuously, since needs and motivations change quickly.
   
2. Structure your sales process based on customer buying steps. Replace your sales process steps with customer action steps. Continually drive for more specifics on the steps customers follow, such as seeking friend recommendations, scanning for good reviews and checking impact on the environment. Tune your sales process to address each of these.
   
3. Make selling collaborative rather than the domain of a single sales person. With today’s online tools, let the customer see and hear from your support organization, marketing and top executives. The customer needs to feel like he is joining a team who has his back rather than negotiating a special deal. Make every sale a win-win outcome.
   
4. Identify specific decision points and demographics of the buyer. Individual buyer demographics can no longer be generic titles, such as mother, owner or organization. With today’s analytics, you can -- and need -- to look deeper at each customer for culture, age, lifestyle and buyer-experience expectations. Selling to the wrong profile loses sales.
   
5. Identify the key relationships behind the customer buy decision. Trusted advisor connections and personal relationships often outweigh price and feature comparisons. This is true even with corporate executives, as well as individual consumer decisions. These relationships may be from support groups, online influencers or industry experts.
   
6. Forecast lead closure rates based on customer buying steps completed. Sales projections based on sales steps completed puts the focus on the wrong equation. Closing sales requires an understanding of how to get the customer to move to the next step in his buying process. Where this need is not met should be a new marketing task.