Part 1: A guide to customer relationship management: The art of opening and closing a sale

Tutorial 1: Keeping customers at the heart of your business

“Staff = Overhead, Customers = Profit”

This tutorial is part of a three part series which will assist you in ensuring that your customers are at the heart of your business operations, whether you are selling face to face or online. Tutorial 2 and 3 will outline a range of invaluable techniques in ‘The 6 steps to successful selling’.

Knowing Your Company:

It is essential to have comprehensive knowledge of your company's background and ethics as well as the range of your company's products, in order to meet the customer needs. Always attend or facilitate company training days and do your own research into the products you are required to promote, market or sell.

Customer Focused Selling:

When you're selling, you've got to leave behind the focus on your business and your products and focus instead on your customer and your customer's needs.

Sell Solutions, not products!:

Don't think of this approach as 'selling to the customer' but rather, helping customers to find solutions to what they are looking for. Forget your objectives, sales goals, and other concerns and focus instead on helping the customer with your expert knowledge and the products and services you have available

Every customer is different:

• Customer focused selling means helping your customer find added value in the product or service you are selling to them.
• You need to focus on and communicate to the customer the benefits, the product or service will bring your customer and how these benefits will contribute to the customer's objectives.
• Today more than ever, each customer has very unique concerns and you can't sell until you find out what those concerns are!

Have a dialogue not a presentation!:

Keep your sales presentation customised to the one customer you are with. Customers don't want to hear about how great your company is or how wonderful your products are. They want to have their concerns answered. Think of your presentation as a two-way dialogue in which both you and the customer explore the customer's needs first and then determine how your products or services may be able to meet those needs.

Put on your customer's shoes!:

Customer focused selling means imagining yourself in your customer's shoes from the beginning to the end of the sales process. Wouldn't you rather deal with a sales person who is aiming to sell you the best product or service for your needs rather than the one that they can make the most money on?

Link Selling:

When introducing a range of products to the customer. Ensure that they are relevant to each other and serve a common purpose. This approach is known as 'Link Selling'. i.e.: if a customer is interested in a fragrance (perfume or cologne). You can demonstrate the layering process whereby you should apply some body lotion on the back of the customer's hand, then spray some body spray from the same range and finally apply the fragrance.

This process will give the customer the opportunity to realise the fragrance will last longer throughout the day, (i.e., the benefit) whilst you will have successfully introduced 3 products. If selling online, you would explain the process in an informative way, within the product description.

I hope tutorial 1 was helpful, for steps 1 - 4 on 'The art of opening and closing a sale' read tutorial 2.