How to Develop a Winning Customer-Centric Sales Strategy

Discover the secrets to transforming your sales approach and boosting your success rates with a customer-centric strategy.

If you are an individual who wants to win more deals and deposit more commission checks in your checking account, this article will help you succeed in B2B sales.

If you are a sales leader or sales manager with a team that needs to win a greater number of the opportunities they create to reach your revenue growth, this article will provide you with a customer-centric sales strategy.

Understanding Buyer Needs in Sales

Your buyers and decision-makers want to make a significant change in their business that will improve their results. These contacts all want to be able to succeed in getting the decision right on the first attempt. Even though your contacts do some amount of research while pursuing their change initiative, they tend to need more information and insights to fill in the gaps in their knowledge and their experience. A client-centric sales strategy is necessary to provide your contacts and their stakeholders with what they need to reach their goal.

Common Mistakes Salespeople Make

What buyers, decision-makers, and other stakeholders tend to reject is a self-oriented approach that feels like they are being sold. This includes anything a salesperson does that would cause your contacts to believe that you or your sales organization prioritize your own outcome over your clients’ needs. There are still sales organizations that practice brutish, high-pressure, and manipulative sales strategies. This includes anything that might cause your contacts to believe your goal is about you and your company.

Effective Sales Strategies for Success

We can bundle a number of sales strategies under one super strategy that provides buyers and decision-makers what they want most. This super strategy is about creating information disparity and it allows you to supply your contacts with what they need to be able to confidently make a decision that will produce the client’s desired outcomes. In order to use information disparity, you should work on the following supporting strategies.

Sales Strategy 1: Preparation: This first sales strategy is an important foundation of a customer-centric sales strategy. By doing the research and reading that help you to understand the company and their industry, you will score points for doing what most salespeople fail to do. This is an important first step in being client-centric.

Sales Strategy 2: Executive Briefing: You can prove you have done your homework by using an executive briefing that shows you understand what kind of problems the client is likely to have, and the forces, factors, and trends they are facing. Support your briefing with cited data points. This is the opposite of the self-oriented approach that has the salesperson trying to promote their company and their solution. This is one of the sales strategies of information disparity.

Sales Strategy 3: Leading the Client: It is your obligation to lead your clients. This task falls to you because you solve problems like this every day, while your client only rarely makes this decision. They don’t know what they don’t know, so they cannot lead their own buyer’s journey. This is another of the strategies you find in information disparity.

Sales Strategy 4: Open-Ended Questions: In the last couple of months, sales leaders have shared that their sales force doesn’t ask open-ended questions. I can promise your contacts want—and need—to talk. The more you allow your contacts to talk, the more they recognize that you are client-centric, and the more you learn about the way they do business. Even though you should be One-Up, meaning you have greater knowledge of and experience with the problem they are facing, you get there by learning from your clients. You can improve your customer-centric approach by being the best listener.

Sales Strategy 5: Patience in the Sales Conversation: This idea about speeding up, something sales leaders describe as velocity. In reality, velocity leads to displacement—and not the good kind when you displace a competitor. The faster you try to go through the sales conversation, the more you displace your contacts, especially in the Era of Decision-Making. This makes it harder for you to lead them on their buyers’ journey. The more patient you are in the sales conversation, the more your client recognizes you are serving your contacts.

Sales Strategy 6: Enable Decision-Making: Information disparity, if not addressed, leaves your contacts no better at the end of the conversation than they were when they walked into the room. Because you sell every day, while your buyers do so on rare occasions, you should know what your contacts don’t understand well enough to make a decision. You should take some time making a list of what you know that would help your client to have the certainty and confidence to move forward.

Sales Strategy 7: Resolving Concerns: Even if your contact doesn’t suggest they have some concern, you improve your client-centric sales strategy by eliciting any concerns they might have. It’s better to get everything out in the open as early as possible. Leaving your contacts to worry about something that might cause them to feel uncertain means they will lack the confidence they need to make it through their buyer’s journey.

Sales Strategy 8: Ensuring Execution and Results: In the end, you and your company ensure the execution and the results you promised your client. You may have to work with your operations team and support them in the execution of the solution and the changes the client may need to succeed.

Before you leave this article and assess how client-centric your sales strategies are, make the adjustments that will have your prospective clients prefer to buy from you. Your performance should have you winning more deals, especially when it is contested, as your contact will compare your customer-centric sales strategy with that of your competitor.

Do good work, and we’ll see you tomorrow.