INNERGISE!

Each month Innergy research an area of business that is pertinent to our customer database, carrying out a brief survey and providing some practical ideas that can be immediately implemented to help individuals, teams and organisations overcome some of the key challenges they face and exploit any opportunities available to them.

In April’s review we asked those polled what they believed was the main criteria that customers use when deciding which supplier to buy from and it seems that price, alongside the quality of the product, whilst important, is just one part of the puzzle.

This immediately begs a simple question to me, in that when we are pitching to prospective customers, what are the key components that make up our marketing efforts and sales collateral and do they align with these key criteria, as outlined by the customers themselves?

Many sales pitches tend to be developed based on our assumptions of what we think our customers want to hear or will base their decisions on and very rarely on actual feedback and input from the clients themselves.

So the question we should be asking ourselves as a testing ground for the validity of our own sales effort is that if we were to presume in this instance that the results of the survey above represent the results of a survey of your actual clients’ buying criteria, then what should the main message of your marketing and sales pitch be?

In this instance, outlining the customer experience and the benefits of each element of that customer experience should clearly make up a major part of your pitch.

We should be ensuring that the customer can clearly see that the value of that has more significance than the overall cost of the product in the first place (we should be educating our clients continuously that the time and resources utilised by a customer as part of their relationship with a buyer, has a very real and measurable cost implication on their side and should be taken into account when weighing up the costs of a purchase – the focus must always be on the overall return on investment (ROI) and not cost).

When mapping out your personal capability statement as a business, we need to ask, what are the key differentiators between your business, your products, your service and those of your competitors and more importantly, are those differentiators aligned with these key buying criteria of your customers, or are they actually irrelevant in the eyes of the buyer?

This month’s Rapid Review has clearly identified that the customer experience is king and there are a number of ideas you can use to exploit that by clicking here, but more significantly, and first and foremost, each of us should be running our own rapid review, our own assessment of our prospective customers to ensure that what they are looking for in a supplier / partner is being accurately targeted when we develop our pitches, marketing collateral and brand reputation … otherwise we end up selling a great story to no-one who has any interest in it!

Contact info@innergy.co.uk if you would like to run an anonymous assessment across your customer database as to what they look for in a supplier / partner.

In a future report, we will look at how to manage the price / cost / ROI question in more detail so that it becomes a key selling point and not a barrier to sales.