sellIng WITh Kahle

Knowing your customers

The expression “know your customers” has been proclaimed from the pages of marketing books and the lips of marketing gurus so often that it has become a cliché. However, it’s been my experience that, while everyone gives lip service to the concept, very few businesses really practice it.

As a result, too many businesses scatter their sales and marketing efforts in a helter-skelter attempt to build the business. They squander their marketing resources and struggle to focus them where they will bring the best results. Sales remain flat; confusion and frustration grow.

“Knowing your customer” means developing several complimentary processes for acquiring and using important information about your customers, and then regularly and routinely implementing those processes.

Salespeople can use knowledge of their customers to manage their time more effectively and to refine and deliver attractive proposals and presentations. Sales managers can use it to direct salespeople to the highest-potential customers. Sales executives can use it to make effective decisions about products, pricing and sales processes. Knowledge of your customers is the most powerful of all a company’s accumulated information.

Your ability to know your customers begins when you develop a database of useful information about your customers. If you have a CRM or ERP system, you probably have the mechanism necessary to manage this. If not, create an account profile form, and see to it that it is used regularly.

An account profile form is a document full of questions or, more precisely, spaces for the answers to questions. If you are using CRM software, the account profile form can be several screens for each account. If not, you can create it on paper. Regardless of the media, the principles and processes are the same.

In addition to the information about each business, you need another version of the form for each key individual within those accounts. That’s called a personal profile, and it’s the mechanism you use to collect personal information about the key decision-makers. Apply the same principles to the task of collecting personal information. You may end up with one document for the company and five to 10 personal profiles for all key people within that account.

Here’s how to create this important systems tool. 1. Identify each of the markets to which you sell. You may sell to a number of different kinds of customers. Each different type of business should have its own version of the form. 2. Create a list. Begin the form by listing all the things you’d like to know about your account. For example, you might find it useful to know which competitors are currently involved in the account, who your customer’s customers are, what products they manufacture, etc. The key is to determine the information that is useful to you.

Then, create the personal profile. List all the things that you’d like to know about the important individuals within that account, such as where they went to school, their interests and hobbies, who you may know in common, and organizations to which they belong. 3. Edit. Now, edit your list of ideas down to those pieces of information you consider most useful. Start with the basics—name, title—and add important business information, like how much of each product that account purchases each year, what kind of business it is, and who makes the buying decisions. 4. Design the form. Now, create the form with spaces for each of the answers to the questions you listed above. Don’t get too involved in creating the perfect looking document. No matter how thorough a job you’ve done, you’ll probably revise the form in a few weeks after you have some experience working with it. So, design something that is workable for now, and let your dayto-day use direct the fine-tuning adjustments that you’ll make along the way. 5. Implement. See to it that the form is used to collect information on every sales call. This doesn’t mean that you, or your salespeople, interrogate every customer. You can generally collect the information on the account portion in a formal session. When you do, your customers will generally be impressed with your professionalism and thoroughness.

That formal approach won’t work for the personal portion. With this piece, you’ll need to review the form before each sales call, solidifying in your mind the information you already have and determining what’s missing. Then, in the course of the conversation, listen for missing pieces. Completing the form may take months of sales calls. 6. Refine. Review your master form from time to time and revise it as you get experience with it. You’ll soon determine what information is impossible to collect, and what really isn’t useful. If you’re using a computer, now is the time to load the revised form into your contact manager. 7. Refer to it. Store the information in a database within your organization. It is not enough to have salespeople keep the information on their laptops. Remember, this information is an asset of the company, and needs to be maintained in the company’s computers.

From time to time, review the information you have collected. You can use it to help you make good marketing decisions, to continually refine your offerings to your customers, and to more precisely target your sales efforts.

– Dave Kahle is a leading sales authority and author of books, including How to Sell Anything to Anyone Anytime (www. davekahle.com).