Improve the Sales Process by Focusing on Your “Ideal Customer”

By Ellen Bristol

Although there is little evidence to say whether men or women sell better, it's a fact that high sales performance is tied to good relationship skills. And in the U.S., strong relationship skills tend to be associated with women. If your selling challenge has to do with building relationships, then it's possible that the women in your organization may have an edge.

How can your organization enhance that competitive edge so that sales reps of both sexes benefit? Redesign your sales function to place an emphasis on two things:

1. Understanding the customer's perspective.
2. Developing a clear, systematic strategic process.

Use the customer's perspective to craft questions and messages that reveal the potential value of the opportunity early. Follow the strategic process for continuous improvement of sales performance.

Here is a good example of how a small business in Florida leveraged the ability of its key executive women to achieve sales success. Cari Brito, the controller at Tropics North, a commercial landscaping firm, had worried for years about the weakness of her company's selling efforts. She observed that the salesforce produced a high level of activity but not a corresponding level of business; their forecasts rarely came true. She hated the uncertainty, and worried about the costs of all that activity. But today, after a year of effort to change the picture, Cari can sleep at night.

Cari and the company's lead sales person, Jane Gregson, worked together to define a profile of their ideal customer, based on existing relationships. Once they had a good idea of the profile, Jane discovered that she was great at asking probing questions early in the game, to find out if her next prospect shared characteristics of the ideal buyer. Using this information as a starting point, the company developed a strategic selling process based on the Ideal Customer Profile. By tracking performance according to the process indicators, Jane and the other salespeople shifted their sales performance from hit-or-miss to consistent and predictable. More qualified prospects led to more profitable deals, at higher revenue levels.

Previously, Tropics North, like many other companies, relied on the conventional wisdom of that time-tattered "factoid" that relies on 10-to-1 prospecting: ten phone calls to get an appointment, ten appointments to get somebody to ask for a proposal and ten proposals to get an order. Their old forecasting methods were based on optimism and best guess. This made forward planning and purchasing a hit-or-miss proposition, a financial nightmare for any business. Jane and the other reps spent most of their time slugging it out with prospects of all types, emphasizing "tell and sell" methods, without doing much effective qualifying. They figured that if they hit enough prospects often and hard enough, then "something" would happen.

Today, Jane and the rest of the Tropic North salesforce know exactly what it means to be productive and effective. They ask leading questions designed to create a sense of relationship at the very outset of the campaign, questions that reveal the fit between the opportunity and the Ideal Profile. These questioning techniques create a high level of trust with prospects, so that those who are qualified move forward and those who do not make the grade can exit without a negative attitude toward Tropics North.

Having qualified the prospect, the sales team has become expert at leveraging relationships to create viable win-win opportunities, where the customer is more willing to participate openly, share his or her perspective and move the opportunity forward. The reps track a number of key actions taken by customers that tell whether they are effective in moving toward the desired result of a sale. The focus is on the ratio between effort and close, not just on revenue. When they want to improve performance, they improve the process.

The emphasis on relationship building gets prospects to open up early and reveal their underlying definitions of success, share their concerns about unscrupulous contractors, talk about the money they have available for projects and other critical factors. In the past, Jane had focused on a more adversarial style that made her uncomfortable. Moving her selling style to this relationship approach encourages her to probe for the prospect's true needs. And if those needs don't fit the company's profile adequately, she doesn't continue to press.

Here are four steps you can take to improve the sales process in your company:

1. Understand the costs associated with pursuing the wrong opportunities;
2. Define the profile of the Ideal Customer, identifying the desirable characteristics that predict successful customer relationships;
3. Use great relationship skills to develop an alliance with your prospects and customers, based on their own perspective of needs and preferences;
4. Walk away from the DOA's—the accounts that are "dead on arrival" and should never have been started in the first place.

Smart People Work Less and Sell More
The secrets of great selling have little to do with the gender of the seller, and more to do with the seller's relationship skills and a strategic process that focuses on the Ideal Customer. All smart sales reps can make their selling efforts work for them more productively. Women do not inherently hold an edge here. But it is certainly true that women in our society tend to be groomed to value good relationship skills, to a greater extent than do men. If you have women sales reps with such great skills, leverage them--use them as mentors and pick their brains. Watch their questioning and listening techniques. Ask them how they get prospects and customers to open up. And record their answers!

If you would like to learn more about this topic, consider these AMA seminars:

• Fundamental Selling Techniques for the New or Prospective Salesperson—Level I
  
• Value-added Selling
  

Author Bio: Ellen Bristol founded Bristol Strategy Group in 1995. Her company provides training products and consulting services for sales effectiveness, based on the company's innovative methodology "Selling the S.M.A.R.T. Way™." For more information: www.bristolstrategygroup.com or call 305-576-6236.