Tell Your Customer What They Want

Employees and suppliers are only listening to customers and then doing what they’re told. The focus is on taking customer requirements and attempting to turn them into a to-do list. Mostly instruction questions are asked instead of outcome questions. Their heart is in the right place, but employees and suppliers are listening too much.

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Disruptive Selling: Get Away From the Edges

There are two reasons customers form new relationships with vendors:

  1. Their current vendor or self-serve process is broken
  2. Their current vendor or self-serve process works fine but can be eliminated in favor of a substitute

The first reason is quality-driven. The customer is looking for a process or product to work the way it is supposed to work. They want a vendor focused on executing an old vision.

The second reason has nothing to do with quality, it has to do with value. The quality is good, but there are alternatives that are more valuable to their organization. They are working with vendors focused on a new vision.

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Disruptive Selling: One Problem, One Service

The natural disposition of most salespeople hunting for new logos is a desire to offer the world to their prospects. Hunters work hard to establish contact with C-level executives. Unfortunately, when they land that phone call or email exchange, they usually never win a first appointment. This is because the most common approach in asking for a first appointment with an executive is for the salesperson to give a corporate capabilities presentation to the prospect. This is not something that anyone in the customer's c-suite wants to spend their time doing. They are spending large amounts of time on their own company, and the thought of sitting through a one-hour presentation on every service another company offers is repulsive to them.

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