Episode 09: The #1 Way to Stand Out to a Customer
Hello everyone and welcome to the golden rule of selling podcast with Katie Mullen. I am very excited you're here as usual. And today we're going to be talking about something that came up in one of my groups that I'm in a sales group. I think it was on LinkedIn actually and somebody asked the question of “What can you do to stand out in the sea of salespeople"? Customers get so many communications every day or every week.
What can you do to really stand out?
And I thought that was a really interesting question. I mean, all salespeople know in theory that it’s the ultimate goal, but sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the world of forecasting and expense reports, and forget that we need to do everything we can to really stand out.
I got to thinking about this, and there’s really two parts to this dilemma. How can you stand out in a positive way? Rise above the noise? But conversely, how can you avoid standing out in a terrible way? If you’re a regular listener, you probably heard the podcast I did recently with a customer called Chris Nowak. if you haven't listened to that, I would definitely go back and listen to that podcast. One of the things he talks about is he cannot stand it when somebody picks up the phone and calls him and they don't know anything about him.
You know, they're that, I like, that, I reaching out to you because you're on my accounts list. And they know nothing else about him. They actually ask him questions like how many hospitals he manages, where they’re located, and stuff that they should already know before they ever pick up the phone. That is a huge turnoff to him. He cannot stand that. He wants people to know who he is what equipment he's been buying in the past and just kind of some Basics before they reach out to him.
So, let’s talk about how you can stand out in a GOOD way, and pissing off your customers.
The key is personalizing all communication with your customer.
I'm a big fan of making a lot of calls, I have been known to make you know, 30, 40, 50, even back in the day 100 calls a day. And this strategy works in some industries, but obviously there is only so much time in a day, so if you’re making 100 calls per day, it’s really hard to do research on everyone.
It totally depends on what business you're in but for the most part for most businesses, you're going to need to know something about that customer before you call them.
So how can you do that? How you can you do research quickly on each customer before you pick up the phone or send that email?
The biggest thing you're going to get bang for your buck is going to be talking to other sales reps within your company. Now in my old job there were several reps for any account calling in there for all different products. To the customer, a sales reps for GE is a sales rep for GE, for example, and if they have had issues or complaints, it’s likely they’re going to share them with any warm-bodied GE rep. Plus, they’ll know all about the customer’s personality, likes, dislikes, and such. They even might be able to tell you who they bought from in the Past and if they had a really bad experience. If they hated the old sales rep and that’s the only reason they didn’t buy, you’re in great shape because now you're the new sheriff in town. I will also mention there is a great app called Voxer. It allows people to basically send each other voicemail, and they can listen to them whenever they want to, when they’re out on the road and such. For example, I use it with my web designer. Sometimes it takes too long to type out an email, but if you’re driving early in the morning, you hate to call someone, but maybe that’s the only time you have available. Voxer is great for this. I have no affiliation with them, I just want you to know about it, because it would be a great way for fellow reps to stay in touch and share info about customers.
It's also really important to find out what their fiscal year is and what their budget cycle is, which might not be something you're going to be able to find on the website or on. The internet but again might be something that you can get from internal company maybe from an internal report or software or your CRM or possibly just from your other sales rep. That really shows that you know them and I would just keep track of that just in an Excel spreadsheet or however, you're keeping track of your customers just every single customer you should know what their fiscal year is and what their when they start budgeting for that fiscal year.
Now another way to find out information is from LinkedIn, but just keep in mind that LinkedIn is only as good as the people who are reporting on it and what I mean by that is even just recently I have reached out to several people that I used to work with who are now the VP of sales at X company or the you know, president of X company only to find out that they've been furloughed because of Covid but their LinkedIn is still updated and you know, that's totally okay to do and I think It's normal and the reason people do it is because obviously when your job searching it looks better to be employed rather than unemployed, but it just means that you can't rely on LinkedIn to be updated because it's not a third party that's updating that information. It's the it's the person themselves. So yes, it's a great place to start. Especially a great place to start if your customer is active on LinkedIn and posting articles and even commenting. So when you go to their profile, you can go to their activity and you can see what they've commented on and that's it's really helpful to know what your customers interested in and their background but that's not necessarily something you're going to be bringing up at your first meeting them their personal information,
Another way on LinkedIn that you can get information is from LinkedIn Navigator. I don't know how many of you guys have used LinkedIn Navigator. I wouldn't say it's a new tool but I think it's becoming more prevalent and I think it replaces Google Alerts. Just FYI, I have no affiliation with them, but I do like it. So in the past, I would always advise people to use Google Alerts because anytime your customer is posting something or in the news at all. Maybe they have just gotten announced that they're the recipient of the blah blah blah award for patient satisfaction, Or maybe they've just entered maybe they've just introduced a new product. Whatever it is when they're in the news. You're going to get a Google alert about it sales Navigator does the same thing and I do like it because when you add people as contacts and I'll probably do a whole podcast on sales Navigator, so I'm not going to get into too much Lincoln Navigator. I'm not going to get into too much detail. But if you want to try Lincoln Navigator you can it does cost money, but I have found it to be pretty valuable for finding out information about each customer
Another person I would talk to within your company is the service people. So the sales people are obviously very important to talk to you. But the service people I would definitely reach out to them. If the customer has had some bad experiences. It's good to know that to get ahead of it to address it right from the beginning. So you're not going in blind and your service customer your service rep is going to really know that
The next way is obviously company website, you know, it's not always super updated. But sometimes they'll have a Blog that you can get on that can be helpful. But you can just get the basics. You need to know the basics of the company before you call them. You don't need to know every single detail about them.
The last and final place is from the customer themselves. BUT, keep in mind that if you have somebody that you know is going to be a key decision maker within your hospital. Maybe they're the nurse manager or the VP of sales or whatever they are. You know, they're going to make the final decision, so you should be willing to put in a little extra time, to make sure it’s very clear that you UNDERSTAND them. And are willing to put in the time to learn more. You don’t want to spend your valuable time with the decision maker, asking for information you should already know. You're probably not going to want to reach out to them to get this information. I would find somebody within the company whose less involved in the final decision who's friendly and get the information from them. You can find out tons of information from maybe it would be there their assistant maybe with if you're selling to hospitals the BioMed’s our wealth of information and usually they're willing to talk and be involved at least in in giving you some helpful details.
Now what you're going to do with these helpful details is also very important.
And you don't want to go in and just spew all this data to them that you hey, you know everything about them. I would pick one little good nugget to make sure that they know that you have researched them and you know something that that is very important and you're going to pick that based on the information that you find out whether that's yes.
I know that you've bought from us in the past and you didn't have a great experience. We have X now that is going to address it or BioMed’s you know,
I just noticed that you released a new product. Congratulations. I hope That's going well. Whatever it is
I would pick one or two little things that you can address when you talk to them either over the phone or on email.
Now that you know how to do this, keep in mind that can’t let yourself get too bogged down on this because yes, it's important to do some research, but you don't want to spend an hour or two researching every customer.
Thank you so much for listening.
Please reach out with any questions! We’ll have another great customer interview for you next week!
Links
MMS Consulting (My Consulting company)
