Individual Customers are the Key to Successful Selling

Just like recognizing that you must design products for people, you also need to realize that purchase decisions are made by people as well. That means the core of your sales strategy needs to revolve around learning about and building relationships with the specific people you serve best within your customers’ organizations.

Looking at the customer slide in a start-up CEO’s slide deck, you will typically see highlighted logos of recognizable company brands. It is one of those subtle things that implies that the whole organization bought the start-up’s product.  And, on one level, that is true. The bank account that was the source of the funds for the purchase was in the company’s name. Yet, on another level, those customer organizations are made up of individual people – and it was some individual person or group of people who actually invested time and energy in learning about the product, deciding that the product met a worthy need, executed the purchase order, and began making use of the product in their business.  Calling the organization won’t get you a testimony about the product. To get that, you must discover the actual people who made the buying decision and are using the product to call to check on how that buying process went and how satisfied they are with the product.

This is important because start-up team members/leaders who have not sold products before can make the mistake of treating the businesses that buy their products as if it is the “business” that is making the buying decision, instead of the people who buy their products make up the business. When you focus on the idea that you are selling to people, it brings into focus some ideas that will help you build a successful sales strategy, such as:

• Know who your target customers are. Not just the organizations but the individuals within those organizations. For example, Accuri’s initial customers were research institutions like universities, government research labs, and pharmaceutical companies. However, the “real” customers we needed to convince were the individual research immunologists and biological scientists who ran the individual labs and directed the research.  At Fifth Eye, our target customers are U.S. hospitals. However, within the byzantine hospital organizations, the Chief Quality Officers, Chief Nursing Officers, Chief Medical Officers, Chief Medical Information Officers, and unit leaders across the critical care spectrum are the first people we need to convince that our clinical solution adds value.
  
  
• Understand the specific needs and pressures each potential customer type faces. There are patterns here. For example, hospital nursing and medical leaders face similar problems across institutions. With some work and focused listening it is possible to build a reasonably detailed understanding of what typical responsibilities and goals are and what hurdles are likely to be present for each individual archetype. This insight needs to be developed by role. Then the individual sales team for any given target organization is responsible for determining how closely the contacts within that organization map to our template understanding and in what essential ways they differ. This process allows customization of the offering to fit the particular people involved, enabling trust, effective communication, and ultimately satisfactory sales.
  
  
• Build the right sales team to align with the backgrounds of your target customers. Understanding your interface types enables you to craft a sales organization that can bring suitable backgrounds, information, and insight to bear to allow faster, more effective, and more favorable decision-making by customers. For example, when we were selling to research scientists, we needed to populate our sales team with knowledgeable scientists with experience using flow cytometry that could help relate how this new product could be applied in a research setting in a credible way. Similarly, when selling to hospital clinicians, having a highly-skilled nurse on our team helps us avoid mistakes and helps the target customers have someone on our team they can relate to who clearly understands their “in the trenches” experiences and problems. These points of connection quickly establish credibility and enable effective problem-solving and objection-handling.
  
  
• Effective objection-handling depends on relating to individual experiences and points of view to address concerns. While people holding specific roles in an organization often have similar objectives and constraints, there is also the individual set of life experiences each individual brings to their role. When someone has had a bad experience of a particular type, they are often vigilant to avoid that bad experience in the future, and that unique patchwork of experiences that they bring to the conversation shapes the objections they care most about.  Over decades of making complex sales, I have noticed a pattern that when someone really digs in on an issue, there is often a previous bad experience that is playing out in the current conversation. The resistance you are running into may well be more connected to a fear of repeating a similar bad experience from another related context rather than something directly connected to the truth of your product or sales pitch. Careful listening and unpacking of the objection can sometimes give you clues about whether you are dealing with extrapolation from another experience or something rationally related to your offering. If you can, ask open-ended questions to try to elicit a description of what might have happened in the past so you can help highlight differences between that situation and the present one.   
  
  
• Leverage points of intersection to build rapport. Individuals have a myriad of interests that can provide points in common that help create connections and trust. Engaging in some small talk can often reveal opportunities to relate to one another as people and begin to build human connections and trust.
  
  
• Treat your contacts with respect. Appreciate and respect the gifts of time, attention, and feedback your sales contacts offer. Apologize if you make a mistake. Realize that the little things that communicate that you appreciate them and the pressures they are facing will encourage giving you the benefit of the doubt and avoid creating unnecessary barriers. Remember that this must be authentic and real to be effective.

Keeping in mind that selling is all about connecting with individual people is essential for success. Marketing often deals with personas and archetypes.  Sales, on the other hand, translates that into individual connections and relationships – and it is ultimately those people on the other side of the table who make the buying decision.