Maximising Customer Loyalty Through The Sales Experience

The HBR Insight Centre recently published a 4 part series on Growing the Top Line, and in one of the posts which focused on sales, Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson referenced a survey of more than 5000 business customers, in which they found that of all the possible factors that could drive customer loyalty - including brand, product / service quality and price-to-value ratio - by far the biggest driver is the sales experience, accounting for 53% of the overall total.

Dixon and Adamson then reflect on what the key components of a good sales experience are, and start by focusing on 'the one question that is probably asked by more people in a given day than any other' - "What's keeping you up at night?"

While it seems innocuous - maybe even the right thing to ask a customer – it’s a question that simultaneously prevents sales while also destroying customer loyalty. To understand what makes this question so destructive, we need to first understand where it comes from. For year, most sales training has focused on a single core principle; the shortest path to sales success is a deep understanding of your customers' needs. If we can understand what's keeping customers up at night, we can build tight linkages between their problems and our solutions, thereby improving our chances of selling something.

As a result, companies have poured money into teaching their reps to ask better questions. But while it sounds great on paper, this approach suffers from two major problems. First, improving reps' ability to diagnose needs on the fly proves colossally difficult - especially among average performers. Second, and more to the point, this approach is based on a deeply flawed assumption; customers actually know what they need in the first place.

But what if they don't know what they need? What if a customers' greatest single need, ironically, is to figure out exactly what they need. If this were true, the better sales technique might be to tell customers what they need.

In our experience, it can certainly be true that a customer may not in fact have a full view of what their needs are, which does make it sub-optimal to simply 'accept' what they say. However, while there may be value for a sales professional to share insights they have gathered (or which reflect core competencies of the organisation they represent) in the course of a customer conversation, we would also suggest that the approach of 'telling' customers what they need is also sub-optimal.

The 3rd alternative we encourage is one of 'mutual exploration', where by a sales professional learns to facilitate a client conversation in a structured way, such that they illicit what a customer knows 'top of mind', what a customer knows / feels 'subconsciously' and what details may be 'unknown' to the customer. This then creates the opportunity to engage more widely with those who would be able to input on these 'unknown' details, thus creating a broader understanding of the needs while at the same time building a sense of partnership with the customer, as a result of which they are open to a wider and deeper solution recommendations that can exactly meet their needs.