The Importance of Knowing Your Customer

 
Peady’s Selling Engagement sponsored by IRD Prospector

Welcome to this week’s post on sales and selling success.

Here in Australia and also New Zealand a significant chunk of media advertising revenue comes from direct rather than agency sources – maybe less so in the large metros. And that means most media salespeople are dealing with the small-medium sector (SMB’s or SME’s).

It’s not small, there’s 2.6 million businesses in this category.

How much do you know?

Here’s a question. How well do you know the SMB market? What research have you done or do you regularly do?

It’s important. The more you know about this sector, the more you can engage customers in effective business conversations about subjects they are really interested in, the more likely you’ll be successful in building relationships and partnerships!

Apart from the many federal and state government options, industry groups and local Chambers of Commerce, there are plenty of websites that cater specifically to the SMB market and three of the best in Australia are:

Flyingsolo.com.au

Insidesmallbusiness.com.au

Smartcompany.com.au

There are plenty more, so why not ask your customers if they have any favourite websites or sources of information?

Something you’ll be able to use

One fantastic piece of research on the SMB sector comes from the highly respected multi-national company, Deloitte. It’s called “Small Business Imperatives For The Digital Age” and was commissioned by Salesforce. Its brand new and great stuff.

Would you have guessed that the number one imperative for success in the eyes of half the SMB owners in this study is to achieve a work/life balance? 

Equal number two with improving profit margin is achieving growth in sales. Now that’s interesting to those of us in the media sales industry – 40% of SMB’s want more sales. And number four at 31% is to acquire more customers!

Achieving growth in sales and acquiring more customers can only be done via some type of marketing or advertising activity creating leads or traffic. Do you think that could make for an interesting business discussion?
 
What to do?

We all have choices. In your next customer meeting will you focus on selling your products or services? Will you talk about how great your medium is? How many listeners or readers? Maybe ask a few of the standard discovery questions?

Or will you talk about business to the business owner? Talk about the things they are most interested in? Maybe even share some of the best SMB resources? 

Brian Tracy summed it up: “Approach each customer with the idea of helping them to solve a problem or achieve a goal. Not selling a product or service

We all have choices.

Until next week good selling!

About the author 

Stephen Pead is a media industry veteran of 30 years with significant experience in direct sales, sales management and general management. He is based in Sydney and specialises in helping SME’s market their businesses more effectively and providing training for salespeople and sales managers.

He can be contacted at [email protected]

 

 

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