Critical Selling

5It's All about Discovering: Get to Know Your Customers

Discovering needs is one of those things that just about every sales rep says he does. But the truth is that there is a large disparity between top-performing sales professionals who really do a good job of discovering needs and who understand the value of doing so and sales reps who might ask a few basic questions before jumping into their presentations.

Discovering your customers' needs is critical because those needs drive buying opportunities. As discussed in Chapter 4, a good opening sets the stage for you to get to know your customer and discover his needs. Those needs are what create the motivation, purpose, and decision-making impetus behind your customer's drive to move forward in finding solutions with you. Good sales reps ask questions to uncover information that validates needs for the solutions they can provide. Top-performing sales reps, however, dig deeper to discover the root cause of their customers' needs and then utilize that information to more clearly demonstrate how their products, services, and solutions meet those needs.

There's an important difference here. Asking questions to confirm that your customers' known needs fit with the product or service you sell is a lot different than discovering needs at a deeper level and uncovering those needs that even your customers may not be aware of. Top performers focus on the latter approach, asking questions and actively listening to the answers in order ...