In a perfect world, we could steer our customers toward optimal purchases, optimal resupply and service agreements, and zero complaints. Except that that wouldn't be a perfect world. It would be mind control.
Here in the real world, influencing customers and serving customers are inextricably bound: You can't do one without doing the other. And you shouldn't try.
In the past few months, we've talked about how best to influence our peers, our managers, and our direct reports. This month, we'll talk about influencing customers. And all of these areas of influence have something in common: You can't hope to influence unless you first understand. (For a brief overview of some of the research that underlies this point, see Sidebar 1.) That's particularly critical with respect to customers, whose needs and concerns often are very different from those of your own organization. We'll share seven secrets of influencing customers -- and stay tuned until the end, where we'll give you the ultimate secret.
1. Customers are influenced when they feel you have their best interests in your heart, not just your hand in their wallet.
Once on a flight we overheard two consultants from a major international firm congratulating each other on how much money they had been able to get out of the contract they had just negotiated. I wondered how their customers would have felt if they had overheard this. How your employees talk about customers internally will affect how they talk to customers. Demonstrating your concern for the customer's success requires skills, commitment, and integrity. Successful selling requires a concern for the relationship, not just the contract. Truly effective customer-facing employees are those who see "serving" as a calling and demonstrate this commitment in every customer conversation.
2. Customers are influenced when you invest effort in identifying their challenges, problems, needs, and opportunities.
Successful sales professionals are genuinely interested in their customers and ask perceptive questions to diagnose and understand the customer's situation and needs. Unfortunately many sales opportunities are missed because the sales person did not ask enough questions or didn't ask the right questions in the right way. We often receive calls from vendors -- financial services, technology, marketing -- and most of them simply push a product, rather than try to learn our situation and our needs.
"Consultative" sales professionals constantly ask thoughtful questions, showing genuine interest and curiosity about the customer's situation; dig deeper to get to underlying interests and concerns; and probe to uncover important issues. This level of questioning, so essential to influencing, requires patience, skill, poise, creativity, and authenticity.
"Unless I open up with you, unless you understand me and my unique situation and feelings, you won't know how to advise or counsel me." -Steven Covey
3. Customers are influenced when you offer solutions that help solve their problems.
Selling -- and influencing customers -- is ultimately a "helping profession," no matter what you're selling. Done right, a sale is an act of service to your customer, a way to help them get to a better place. If your sales reps do not convey through customer conversations that their goal is to help the customer succeed, then they likely communicate that they are just pushing products.
4. Customers are influenced by empathy.
Have you ever tried to figure out what important factors distinguish an effective salesperson from an average or mediocre one? A landmark study published in the early 1970s in the Harvard Business Review clearly identified two differentiating factors:
- Ego drive: the persistence to keep going in spite of customers who don't buy, to find the ones who will. This factor surprised no one who has been in sales or managed sales people.
- Empathy: the ability to connect with people on a very human level, to get customers to open up and talk about their goals, concerns, and needs. This surprised everyone, and seemed at first counter to the ego drive factor. Yet a balance of both was clearly identified as critical to success.
A few years ago, during the Great Recession, we were asked to design training for 100 financial advisors on influencing customers in a down market. We analyzed current practices and found that when customers came in, they were in severe emotional states - grief over losing a lifetime of savings, fear of what might happen next, anxiety about how they were going to survive through retirement. And the financial advisors were attempting to handle these sad and frightened customers by launching into a spiel about their suite of products, boasting about their track record, and opening Excel spreadsheets of numbers, while customers sat numb, their eyes glazed over.
"If you want to influence me, you first need to understand me. And you can't do that with technique alone." -- Steven Covey
We helped advisors learn to focus first on the customer's emotional state, and to express genuine empathy in appropriate ways. Only after this would customers open up in a dialogue to share their goals, needs, and concerns so that financial advisors could guide them toward a solution. Your customers may not be grieving, but they will still respond positively to being treated with genuine empathy.
5. Customers are influenced by attention to them as a person.
Think about your own experience: the grocery-store checker who swipes your loyalty card and calls you by name; the waitress who notices that your glass is empty; the broker who calls to remind you that you've passed a milestone and it's a good time for a review; the HVAC service guy who volunteers to change your smoke-alarm battery; the manufacturer's rep who remembers your spouse's name and asks about your daughter who's off at college. Those relatively simple interactions, which probably had no immediate impact on your purchasing decisions, nonetheless made you feel valued, didn't they? While you may have sophisticated "big data" that analyzes and quantifies information about your customers, ultimately getting and keeping customers is about people-to-people interactions.
6. Customers are influenced by every employee in your company.
It's a cliché now: If you're not serving the customer, you're serving someone who serves the customer. Not just those on the front lines, but every employee must see himself or herself as part of the solution provided to the customer, no matter their job position. I'm influenced to be a loyal customer when the person stocking shelves or mopping the floor in the supermarket sees me scanning the shelves, approaches me, and says, "Can I help you find something?" - and then walks me to the right spot. Customers are influenced when, instead of saying, "We can't do that," you say, "We'll find a way to make this happen" - and then you engage your whole team to find a way. And customers are significantly influenced by how well your processes function, even if they never interact with most of the people involved in those functions.
7. Influencing customers is also about influencing those "internal customers" who are so critical to satisfying "external customers."
Each functional group, each team must know who their internal customers are and must offer them the same excellent service they all are pledged to offer the external customer:
- Genuine interest in the other; curiosity to understand needs.
- Passionate desire to help solve problems.
- A deep level of listening to understand, not to debate.
- Empathy.
- Attention to the person, not just the process.
- Persistent efforts to collaborate - to "co-labor" - to solve problems, exploit opportunities, and innovate.
8. And now ... the real key: Combining all these elements, you can become your customer's partner in a very real sense.
You and your customer will have the same goals. You'll think in tandem. You'll care about your customer's success as though you were an owner in their business, a stakeholder in their situation. You'll be your customer's advocate within the ranks of your company. You'll rejoice at your customer's success and mourn their losses. You'll feel personally responsible - and take personal responsibility - should there ever be a slip in your service.
At AlexanderHancock we've had vendors who were in many ways the best "employees" we ever had. They looked for ways to make us look good. They initiated creative innovations and solutions. They thought like us. And we loved them for it. For our part, we've worked hard to establish relationships like this with our clients, where they felt we were in tandem with them.
When you work hard to understand and adopt your customer's best interests; when you become fluent in understanding their strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and opportunities; when you understand their problems so thoroughly that you are capable of providing the best possible solution; when you know your customers as people and empathize with their hopes and concerns - then you will be in the best possible position to influence your customers in ways that both they and you will find fulfilling and productive.
Knowing how to do this isn't a gift. It's a skill that anyone can practice and develop. Here are some questions you can ask to get yourself and your organization started (link to Sidebar 2).
