To Win the Sale, Win Your Customer's Heart

To Win the Sale, Win Your Customer's Heart


4:21 PM Tuesday April 6, 2010

You're unappreciated in your company, and you've begun to doubt your importance there.

Huh? How did I know that? I didn't. But I'm rarely wrong when I make that assumption about people, and especially about potential clients. In fact, that premise is central to my company's approach to forging an emotional connection with prospective customers. Everything that happens during buyers' first contacts with our company counteracts their sense of being undervalued and lets them know how important they are to us.

To get a sense of what we do, imagine that you're a prospective buyer and that you've come to our company, at our invitation and cost, to pay us a visit (we routinely invite customers to our facilities). You're going to experience these seven steps to an emotional connection:

•You get picked up at the airport.

•At our headquarters, you're greeted with a welcome sign listing your name and title and all the names and titles of the people with you, along with pictures of your packaged products (we make cans and other types of packaging). By the way, our employees saw the same sign when they came to work, so they know that your visit is the most important thing going on today.

•At the security desk, the guards tell you that your visit is so important to us that you've been preregistered.

•Our salesperson ushers you to the office of the CEO, who is waiting to greet you.

•From there, the salesperson escorts you to the boardroom, the most important and prestigious room in the company, to symbolize your importance to us. Other management types are waiting to greet you.

•With all of our top managers in the room, you're asked to tell us about your company and to brag about yourself.

•We outnumber you five or six to one, so that you can vividly see how important you are.

Selling is both a feeling and a thinking proposition. Treating people as we do opens their hearts by inflating their sense of importance, and it makes them more receptive to the thinking part of the sales process, which takes place next, in these four steps:

•We begin a series of presentations in which our top people tell you who we are, what we do, and how we do it. These are not sales pitches.

•You're taken to a plant where you can judge for yourself whether we walk our talk. Tours are conducted by the people who would be making your packaging, and you're encouraged to ask any questions you want.

•At a reception in your honor, you meet many more people in the company.

•At a gracious dinner in our executive dining room, the people you would be doing business with engage you in unhurried conversation.

Many sales organizations do little to create an emotional connection with prospective customers and concentrate instead on hype-filled sales pitches. We do the opposite: By conveying our warm feelings, we create an emotional bond without appearing phony or insincere. Then, by making an objective presentation, we show that we respect our customers' ability to make their own judgments. The art of selling is in the heart, not the brain.

Clif Reichard (creichar@ball.com) is a sales consultant in his 55th year selling rigid packaging substrates.