What Are the Biggest Mistakes Sales Professionals Make While Trying to Reach New Customers?

At the beginning of this month, I had the chance to speak with Shawn Casemore about his recently published book entitled The Unstoppable Sales Machine: How to Connect, Convert, and Close New Customers. His book addresses the shifts sales professionals and their organizations must make for introducing modern sales strategies. It provides insights and proven strategies for business owners, sales executives, leaders, and professionals -- anyone who desires to create a rapid and sustained increase in their sales without investing significant time or money. 

During our conversation, I asked Shawn: “What are the biggest mistakes sales professionals currently make while trying to reach new customers?” Here is his complete answer:

There is only one mistake sales professionals make while trying to reach new customers or clients – they give up.

A recent Gartner Study has outlined what sales professionals have noticed for years. Buyers spend less time connecting with sales and more time researching their ideal solution.

This continuing shift results in many buyers not engaging with sales until they believe they have a need. This results in one of three possible scenarios for sales -- They must contend with buyers who:

• Engage before they begin researching, with no intention of buying.
• Engage while researching and never circle back to confirm their decision.
• Do not engage as their need isn’t yet clear or urgent.

Unfortunately, experiencing any of these three scenarios can result in sales giving up on the pursuit and conversion of their prospect.

Instead, sales professionals must be more strategic about pursuing new buyers to build trust and curiosity. The first three steps to take in accomplishing this are:

1. Too many sales professionals find a new lead and pursue them aggressively, only to taper off their efforts within the first two weeks after no response. Instead, sales should slowly build outreach, increasing your buyer’s attention and creating the perception that you have something interesting to share.
2. Studies have repeatedly found it takes between 8 to 20 touchpoints to get buyers’ attention. As a result, outreach strategies must consist of at least 20 touchpoints if there is ever an opportunity to connect with the buyer.
3. Many of the sales teams I work with use one primary form of communication - email. Buyers are overwhelmed with emails today, and increasingly complex spam filters are removing more unwanted emails from their inboxes. Instead, sales professionals should use various methods to reach buyers, including direct mail, telephone, video, and social media. 

The only thing to give up when pursuing buyers is old methods of prospecting that are no longer relevant.

What do you think of Shawn’s perspective? Have you or your company experienced these scenarios with potential customers? If so, have you incorporated any of Shawn’s solutions? What other solutions have you tried?

Meeting Customer Needs is Not Enough

Lance B. Coleman recently published a book titled The Customer-Driven Organization: Employing the Kano Model, and I spoke with him about its content. My main question was: “Why is meeting customer needs no longer enough?” Here is his full response:

In an expanding global economy having international competition, meeting customer needs is simply not enough. Meeting customer needs leads to customer satisfaction but does not lead to customer loyalty, which is what keeps companies in business.

Delighted customers, however, are loyal customers. The Kano Model developed by Noriaki Kano describes delightful performance as that which surprises and excites the customer in addition to meeting their basic needs. To “delight” a customer, an organization or individual must become aware of not just what is asked for but rather what is needed. They have to look to the future as inspiration for innovation today.

Quotes from two of our greatest innovators born almost 100 years apart would tend to agree.  Steve Jobs is known to have often said: "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Henry Ford is reported to have said: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse.'”

Providing delightful service is more than just a nice thing to do, it is an imperative for business/professional survival both for the organization and for the individual. What I have tried to share with readers of my book, The Customer-Driven Organization: Employing the Kano Model, was threefold  -- why a philosophical paradigm shift is required to provide truly delightful service, how to practically apply the concepts espoused by the Kano model, and finally, why one should care to do so.