Recognize and Sell to Your Client’s Life Stage
When you’re working as an IT reseller, your success is going to depend on how effective you are in selling products to your clients or potential clients. Many resellers struggle in this area. They may know the product inside and out. They may have great customer service skills, but the combination of all those assets doesn’t seem to translate into sells. What’s the problem? A big part of the problem is that many of these resellers don’t understand the importance of identifying and targeting the client’s current growth stage. By learning how to do this, resellers are going to increase their sales success and earn more money.
What is Selling to Client’s Stage?
If you’re already a reseller, you already know from working with your clients that they come to you with different needs. While some are going to be straight forward with you and know exactly what they need, most of them are going to be floundering through the process. If you’re going to sell them on your product, you have to first decide what they need and where they are in these stages. Otherwise, you won’t be able to close the deal.
The good news is there aren’t dozens of stages to identify or learn. There are only three: foundation, growth, and optimize. You need to know where your client is within these stages so you can use the appropriate sales techniques and maybe even offer the correct product to meet those needs. Below we’ll discuss these different stages in more detail so you can begin to learn them and apply them in your own sales methods.
Foundation Stage
The first of these stages is known as the foundation stage. At this point, most businesses are just beginning to implement new technology solutions into their business in an effort to improve communication between vendors, employees, and customers. That can be a tall order but it’s essential for increasing the overall success of the business. Within this stage, you’ll find companies that are looking to achieve a number of specific goals, including automating many of the business processes, increasing the productivity of workers, and reducing errors in processing. When selling your products, you need to focus on how it will meet these needs.
Growth Stage
The second of these stages is known as the growth stage. Here clients are looking to increase their overall efficiency, usually to become more competitive in their industries and to reduce their overall expenses in the long run. They aren’t so much interested in the central processes of running the business but in finding new ways to make those processes run smoothly with less effort and cost. For example, some of the things customers at this stage might want in their technology solutions is a greater access to information, better collaboration between employees, customers, and vendors, and improved efficiency in other business processes, too.
Optimize Stage
The final of these stages is known as the optimize stage. At this point, your customers are going to want to maximize the results of their interactions with their own customers. They will generally reach this point after going through the other two or after already having satisfied these other two stages from the start. At this point, your clients are going to be looking for solutions that will provide a better customer experience, that will increase their profitability to its upper limits, and that will open up access to data and information.
Identifying the Appropriate Stage
Now that you understand the different stages your customers may go through you need to determine the best way of recognizing which stage your customers happen to be in at the time you are trying to make the sell.
The best way is through communication. Don’t just come out and ask: “What development stage are you in now?” Most of your customers won’t be able to put their needs into words that way. Instead, you need to ask open ended questions that will help you draw an appropriate conclusion. For example, you might say, “What do you want to improve the most in your business?” “Is there a main weakness in how your business is operating right now?” “What specific goals for the technology you’re looking at?”
By asking questions, you’ll gain access to information that will help you make this determination. Once you know the appropriate stage, you can begin to market the appropriate benefits of the technology based on their particular development stage.
About the Author
John Tanner is a marketing consultant and founder of VAR
Strategy.
After a career in military intelligence John helped grow businesses in various
industries through sales and marketing, eventually finding a passion for
challenges and opportunities for business development in the IT channels.
VAR Strategy is a product of this passion and was created to provide
helpful information and resources to assist VAR's in growing their businesses.
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