The collaborative experience your customers demand
While your attention was elsewhere, your customers became empowered.
Maybe you were busy tweaking your website or learning new software or integrating your brand into the social networking sphere. No doubt you were confident you were keeping up with the times. Ironically, it’s those accelerating times, and the quantum technology leaps that come with them, that have handed the keys to your kingdom to the customers you serve.
Doesn’t really matter how you feel about that (and hey, it isn’t all bad - after all, you’re someone’s customer too, eh?) — it’s a simple, unavoidable reality. Resist if you like, others have certainly tried. Most of them have already shuttered their doors.
Today’s buyer is better informed, better equipped, and better engaged than at any time in history. They avail themselves of this ubiquitous tech to compare prices and products and to hunt bargains. That’s the least they can do, with the puniest effort. If they apply themselves just a bit more, if they log just a bit more screen-time, they can learn nearly as much about your business as you know yourself.
Think you can best a buyer like that? Think you can even negotiate from a position of strength? Think again.
It’s time to give up the adversarial selling approach. It’s time to accept this new market reality. Time to transition into the role of collaborator.
Becoming the buyer’s ally is the best, last, and only refuge for businesses struggling to make headway in this evolved economy. It’s the one thing that can set them apart from their less evolved competitors. And it’s precisely what those empowered buyers demand and expect.
Understand that by the time your customer engages with you, their homework is complete and their purchasing decisions are made. Your traditional sales routines are thereby made redundant. What they’re looking for, at this stage, is a partner to help enact their decisions, to usher them through the closing formalities, and to provide the utmost level of back-end service and support.
Understand, above all else, that these are expectations. Your compliance is optional only in the same sense that the continuity of your business is optional.
There are a couple of generations among us now that have never experienced any other kind of market. They don’t know or care that some of us came up in the days when the ol’ hardsell came on hard, and could very much sell.
That kind of selling is gone, class, and it ain’t coming back. The sooner we accept that—the sooner we turn selling into service, in other words—the sooner we succeed.
The C4:
1. The information age begat the information economy. An economy of information means a liberation of information. It means that information has become the great equalizer.
2. The greatest beneficiary of this has been the consumer—i.e. everyone.
3. Prior to making a purchase these days one has the ability; nay, the responsibility, to equip oneself with all available information to make the smartest possible buy. And the available information for doing so is encyclopedic.
4. For the seller, the choice is clear: resist and perish. Or accept, adapt, and collaborate...and ultimately thrive.
