You probably don’t know your customer as well as you think you do. As a result, your business is at risk. Below are 10 questions you need to answer to know your customers, so you can better reach each of them.
1. What are my customer’s business objectives for this year?
2. What is my customer’s personal objective for this year?
3. Who are the other people I need to get to know?
4. What are the competitive threats my customer is dealing with?
5. What are the big issues or risks my customer is dealing with?
6. What would happen if my customer lost their biggest customer?
7. Where is my customer’s growth going to come from?
8. How is my customer’s business perceived in their area and their industry?
9. How important is what I sell to their overall business?
10. How important am I to my customer?
Take a moment to answer each of these questions for every one of your major customers. Similarly, these questions work well when analyzing a prospect to determine how you can best help them, too. As you work through them, I’m sure you’ll find gaps. That means you have work to do. The sooner you can answer each question, the sooner you will become even more valuable to your customer.
Being seen only as a vendor is a bad place to be; however, if you can’t answer any of these questions, you are nothing but a vendor.
It’s going to require a lot of digging to find the answers to all ten of these questions, and the customer must be included in the process. By asking these questions, you are showing the customer that you’re not a vendor but somebody that really wants to work with them. Certainly, your competitors are not asking these questions.
Copyright 2019, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results
