Customer Relationship Management (CRM), literally translated as managing customer relationships. In the meantime, the word has gone through several generations and transformations, and today we are dealing with intelligent, machine-supported applications that allow human-to-human communication to be managed efficiently and effectively.
Through customer relationship management, the view goes beyond the own sales department, the customer is clearly more in focus, his challenges, his problems - these are to be solved and not only to increase sales (cf. power selling).
Of course, at the end of the day, the human being - at least for the moment - remains the decisive element in the sales process. If you are planning to work in sales, there are a few points you should consider, and we would like to share our experience with you.
- Become a subject matter expert in your field: Does someone in sales need to understand and know their product or do they need other talents. Can someone who sells horseshoes for horses also sell software? Isn't it exactly the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that is needed? Why, exactly this product and no other. From our experience you need a deep understanding of what you are selling, you should know the product.
- Be sincere: Knowing about the product also leads to the second point. Sincerity or authenticity, if I don't know what I'm talking about, can I be authentic and credibly convey that a product can solve the problems on the customer side.
- Build relationships: Don't just want to sell: As mentioned above, power selling is purely about sales, meanwhile the focus is on the customer. It's primarily about getting to know the customer, the people behind them. In that sense, we don't come from sales and add another contact to our list at the end, but we meet someone, go on a partnership journey with them at the end of which our service is also relevant and thus sales are realized.
- Listening to customers: Listening more than speaking. People should be allowed and want to share more in the exchange than you do. It is important to understand the needs, the much-cited pain points. We have to be at eye level and not see ourselves too much as the savior. Every customer has his own story, good reasons why he made decisions in a certain way, his very own life experience and experiences and in the end also his very own reason why he invited us to talk to him. All these aspects are important and must not be forgotten. Get to know all the stories.
- Offer solutions: If I know all the stories, if I know my customer and have identified his needs, then and only then, can I offer him the right solution. Who trusts a doctor who prescribes a drug from a distance without asking any questions? In that case, it's probably mostly drugs that work across the board. But the comparison makes it clear that you want to be perceived as a person, in this case as a customer of the doctor, and claim the best solution for yourself. Why should we do less for our own customers and offer them only the second-best solution? Today, far too often specifications are answered without talking to the customers; from our point of view, there are rarely requirement profiles that are absolutely clear and without room for interpretation without any queries. If we get the chance, then a conversation is always the means of choice.
- Building trust: All the points described above ultimately serve the most important, most desirable result - trust between partners at eye level. If I have built a relationship, if I have gotten to know the person, the customer, and if I support him authentically and sincerely, then trust grows. Being reliable and remaining honest in your statements naturally pays off. Trust is the highest level of customer relationship management and also pays back the most in the long term. But beware, this situation is very fragile; once trust has been painstakingly built up and broken, it is very difficult to regain it.
- Remain self-confident: We have repeatedly emphasized how important the customer is, how important it is to understand the customer, and how important it is to focus on the customer's needs. But that in no way means talking down to ourselves. Once again, it's about communicating at eye level, not least because of the technical expertise there is a very specific added value for the customer that he is looking for. Therefore, there is no reason to become too passive, but also to defend one's point of view if necessary, because what applies to the sales department, the customer side may also take to heart. Understanding and trust are mutual admissions.
- Have no fear of contact with people: Sounds logical, if you want to sell something to people, you should talk to people. But in a time of digitalization, we have become email warriors. Text messages, WhatsApp or other arbitrary channels can be used for communication. E-commerce has decoupled brick-and-mortar retail, people now buy without having touched products, but the trend is to map the advice (avatars, chat functions) also in digital stores. This works relatively well for "normal" products that require little explanation, but the more emotion or investment is tied to a product, the more it needs the human factor to explain or ultimately convince. Whenever possible, personal, direct contact takes precedence over other communication channels - at least one face of the counterpart should be perceptible (topic: video telephony).
- Automate routine activities: The more customers there are to serve, the more difficult the personal level becomes. Therefore, effective and efficient time management is necessary. Therefore, it is advisable to automate any activity that can be automated without severely affecting the relationship with the customer. Whether the birthday greeting as an automated mail is sufficient may be debated. But it would also be possible to automatically send flowers to a dear customer or a gift. However, the most likely solution is to automate evaluations that prioritize the next best actions and thus help to do the most urgent things first.
- Study and understand the competition: If you want to be successful in sales, you should of course also know your environment, including its history, and generally understand the market. Particularly in product sales, you can only position your own product advantageously if you know how to classify its strengths. Of course, it is of little use to throw advantages around if a customer can easily counter that the competition is positioned in the same way or can even come up with better arguments. Whether it's Sales Play, Battlecard, or however you structure your arguments in order to place them in a comprehensible way, in the end it's a matter of improving exactly where others are lacking and thus making your own USP clear.