Do you want sustainable profits gained in an ethical manner?
You can have a higher level of customer retention and experience higher sales conversions when you understand the desires of your customers. Not NEEDS, not WANTS, but DESIRES. An individuals desires move them more than anything else (with wants second, followed by needs) even in business relationships.
Here are a few strategies to help you understand the desires of your customers:
Invite existing customers to describe every detail of what they are willing to purchase. Be interested in listening to customers describe what it is they want from your product or service. Make a study of your industry and seek to fill every desire customers in your target market segment. How do you let customers describe their wants?
Invest efforts in proportion to the profits buying customers invest in your business. It is not practical to be all things to all people, so you choose a small segment of a particular audience to concentrate your efforts on providing value they are willing to purchase. Choose a small profitable customer base to organize the efforts of your entire organization. Profit producers rule your direction.
Provide what a customer needs in such a way it fulfills their desires. When you fulfill the emotional desires of your buyers, they will stay with you forever. However, what they really need isn't always what they desire. Often decision makers project personal desires on business relationships-- you product, if positioned correctly, could help buyers become more complete and still solve their problems.
Identify hidden intangible benefits early in each sales engagement. Buyers choose to purchase more because of their own emotional well being than because of what your sales people say. Teach your sales team to identify decision makers desires on a human level and describe your offer in that context. How do you discover what really motivates your buyer?
Seek buying triggers that predict purchase behavior. Look at what happens before a customer decides they need what you offer, then move back further to identify what would make them want to purchase it. A way to do this is to imagine what happened the day before the sales close, the week, the month, and even the year before you identified this opportunity.
Find customers who haven't yet purchased but have the characteristics of profitable customers. Use 10 to 20 buying characteristics to describe your top ten percent customers, then model these same characteristics over your prospective universe. Focus on pursuing only 90% matches and watch your sales conversion rates increase. What tools do you have in place to automate this criteria matching strategy?
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