Setting yourself apart

- If you want to set yourself apart as a seller, your sales skills are one of the best places you can do it. Let's look at how customers experience most sales people. Now, we've interviewed thousands of customers and here's what they told us. Most sales people talk only about themselves and they do it endlessly. Most salespeople don't understand the customer's business. And number three, and this is really tactical customers complain that salespeople send way too many emails and they are way too long. So if you want to stand out you need to do the opposite of that. Here's a few tips. First off, don't start your interactions with a lengthy description of your offering. Instead, focus on the customer. Now, your questioning skills are an area where you can dramatically pull ahead of your competition because most salespeople, if they ask any questions they tend to ask very basic level one questions. Questions like, tell me about some of the challenges you're having or the proverbial and completely overused. What keeps you awake at night? Do not do this. It's level one. If you want to stand out, do some homework in advance to help you ask better questions. If you do your research, you can ask questions like I read your company had a 10% increase in revenue last year. How is that affecting your role? These types of questions are level two questions. It's where you take information that's available online or through company documents, and you ask your buyer questions about how that is affecting their department or their role. You see, level two questions require more business acumen. You need to understand your customer's business. You need to know who their customers are and how their financial model works. If you're an individual you need to understand the reality of your customer's world. Level two questions help you gain insights faster than the other sales people who are asking basic level one questions. And when you ask the customer those questions look them right in the eye. You know, it may seem like a small thing, but the majority of sales people spend the majority of their time looking down at their notes. Looking into someone's eyes and paying full and complete attention to them is so rare for people in any aspect of their lives. And when you do it in sales, it makes you stand out. You know, another way you can differentiate yourself and focus on the customer is brevity. Do not waste the customer's time. If you're not friends, don't act like you are. You know, the same thing applies to voicemails. Long voicemails where you're earnestly pushing to get a meeting, those don't set you apart. Short voicemails with a follow up email are much more effective, which leads us to email, which is one of the single biggest complaints customers have about sales people. When you're sending an email don't try to crowbar in some lengthy product description unless the customer requested it. That usually only happens at the end of a sales cycle. Instead, your email should be short and add value. At the end of the day, everyone is a human being. The more you treat your customers like real humans instead of just an anonymous prospect, the more you will stand out.