Here is where we provide answers to various questions submitted by you, our readers. We publish two questions each month. To submit a question to BizLogx, please click here.

Question:
My consulting firm sells services, not products. How can the CustomerCentric Selling® methodology and workshops help my organization?

Answer:
To answer this question, let's first define "CustomerCentric Selling®". CustomerCentric Selling® is helping your prospect achieve a goal, solve a problem, or satisfy a need.

The Customercentric Selling® methodology and our workshops give your entire company - sales, marketing and others - a process for first understanding your prospect's goals, problems and needs, then helping your prospects visualize how your offerings, in this case, your SERVICES, can help that prospect to meet that important goal, satisfy a critical need, or resolve a problem or obstacle preventing them from achieving their goals.

How is this done? This is accomplished through a directed conversation with your prospect. CustomerCentric Selling® gives a framework for a "questioning etiquette" that helps you ask questions of your buyer to learn their concerns, not imposing your opinion of what you expect that they need. Using questions to direct the conversation, CustomerCentric Selling® helps you to fully grasp that prospect's situation, understand which of your offerings are needed, and propose - as a question - how the prospect might use your firm's services.

One of the most challenging tasks of selling is "getting inside your buyer's head". This holds true for sellers of all offerings - including services. By using this CustomerCentric Selling® process for all sales conversations, plus the CustomerCentric Selling® tactics and tools for managing each step of the selling cycle, your services sales and marketing teams can achieve greater consistency and success.

Question:
We spent a lot of time developing our sales process. Why is my pipeline still inaccurate and unreliable?

Answer:
Many companies have developed their sales process as a representation of their internal ways of doing business. It accommodates their needs to understand how they want to do business while trusting the words of their sales people that the buyer goes along with it. A sales process must represent a prospect's buying cycle. It can only mirror, for a specific industry and specific decision makers' roles, how a prospect intents on reaching a decision to buy from you. The only internal in-puts you can have is to put in place auditable and measurable deliverables your sales people have to execute to monitor the progress of the opportunity through the buying cycle and remove the necessity to rely on your sales people's opinions.

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