What Can We Learn from Tough Customers?

In the April issue of INC magazine, reporter Kasey Wehrum shares Sales Tips from the World’s Toughest Customers. Customers like Coca-Cola, Dell, Intuit, UPS and more. The lessons are simple and yet profound:

• Be different. And then make sure you prove it to us.
• We can spot a fake from a mile away. (In other words, don’t oversell yourself.)
• Go above and beyond. You would be surprised at how few of your rivals even bother to try.
• Companies are buying your reputation, not just your products.
• Do more research than you think you need to.
• Be as specific as possible when describing what you can do for us.
• Start locally, think globally.

All are great tips, but with a passion for building customer relationships, my eyes immediately went to the tip from Intuit about going above and beyond:

“In my experience, there are two ways that a small company can differentiate itself,” says Larry Wood, Intuit’s director of sourcing. “The first is having deep expertise that can give us knowledge about a particular customer segment or a technology. The other thing is flexibility.

He’s so right. We have to start by truly understanding our customer and our offerings so that we know how to best mesh the two. As for being flexible – rules are to be guidelines, but  policies should have room for flexibility when it comes to satisfying customer’s needs.

What not to do?

“It comes down to having a sense of sales professionalism. It bothers me when a supplier comes in and tells us what they want to tell us instead of showing that they understand what our needs are, what our pain points are, and then trying to address them. That is just Sales 101.”

Whether we are trying to land a multi-billion dollar corporation as a client or a single customer spending $200 – these lessons apply.