Building a rapport with the customer

In today’s competitive marketplace, firms need to spend millions of dollars in advertising campaigns and address in-depth market segmentation to direct customers towards specific purchase decisions. As consumers become more sophisticated and demanding, firms need to focus on a more balanced attention to customer acquisition and retention, which is attainable through the development of suitable relationships with key customer segments.

Building a rapport with customers is vital to a firm’s profitability. In this context, businesses focus primarily on customer knowledge aiming to develop long-term relationships with their customers and employ a broad and deep interest in their needs and demands. This customer-centric approach is widely developed through relationship marketing that views the initial rapport with the customer as the beginning of a long-term relationship in which mutual trust and commitment will grow.

To develop outstanding customer rapport that can take customer relationships beyond customer satisfaction, firms need to (1) find common views, (2) be good listeners, (3) be positive and (4) use humor. In particular:

(1)    Find common views: Research suggests that customers, in majority, base their purchasing decisions on who they are buying from, not what they are buying. Generally, customers feel closer to firms that share common views with. They need to feel a connection with the firm and its people that goes beyond being customers. In this context, strong brand name is closely related to strong customer relationships, and therefore, the firms’ representatives need to find common grounds with each customer separately so that each customer feels unique.

(2)    Be good listeners: Customers love to talk about their needs and wants. Good firm representatives should be able to listen to their clients; understand them; giving them his/her full attention; making them feel important. In this relationship, the customer is the driving force and the firm has to follow because without customers there will be no business to operate, no profitability and, ultimately, no firm.

(3)    Be positive: Customers love to do business with firm representatives that are positive and optimistic. In general, positive attitude makes people feel more active and alert and, in the context of business, this may lead to happy and loyal customers, and ultimately, to increased sales and profitability.

(4)    Use humor: A dry sense of humor and the right instincts about when to use it can open the door for establishing long-term customer relationships. Humor eases tensions and enables customers to see the human side of the firm by breaking down mental barriers.

Building trust with customers is also vital to a business’s success. To build trust with a customer, firms may employ numerous strategies including the personalities of their sales force, being responsive to customer complaints and admitting a potential problem. When salespeople are knowledgeable, courteous, pleasant and willing to help their customers, in response customers trust them and feel they can ask for their advice and help anytime for anything. When a firm handles customer complaints in a responsive and responsible way, customers feel they can have someone to listen to their problem, even if they are not right to complain in the first place. When customers detect a particular problem and firms admit it, it’s perhaps the best way for firms to build trust with their customers. Customers need to know the truth about anything that is going on in a company, good or bad. Therefore, firms need to be ready to give reasonable and honest explanations.

Finally, as in all types of relationships, the first impression of a customer about a firm and its products and services can be the cornerstone of how the relationship will evolve in the future. Salespeople should be able to get a feel about their customers’ needs and wants so that they understand the customer’s buying style. There are customers that enter the store, buy the product and leave. These customers do not need more than a five-minute presentation and interaction with a salesperson. However, if they are bombarded by an overly friendly salesperson, their first impression about the salesman, the store and the firm will be negative. Generally, first impressions are lasting impressions and in such competitive business environment, firms cannot afford to lose customers. Businesses should heavily invest in building a good initial rapport that will lead to trust in the long run.

Common sales errors to avoid

Twenty years ago, a sales error could be easily traded off with a new customer. Today, in the competitive sales environment of the Internet and online shopping, it may mean that the customer is lost, most likely to the Internet, forever. Despite the current economic climate, online sales are increasing on a year-to-year basis because they offer the same products at significant lower prices. Yet, they lack the personal rapport with the customer and a competent staff available to handle questions.

However, sales people often make unconscious errors that can cost their companies millions of dollars. On the other hand, if they avoid these mistakes, they will increase their sales record and enhance customer loyalty, which will, ultimately, lead to increased sales through repeated purchases and referrals.

One of the most common sales errors is being unfamiliar with the product. There are often cases that sales people do not know the product characteristics and cannot handle efficiently the questions of customers. Particularly, in consumer electronics that technology is changing at a swift pace, sales people must be well educated and trained on a constant basis to be able to sell the product and explain intricate attributes such as ‘phase coating’ or ‘twilight factor’. Besides, customers are not anymore as they used to be twenty years ago. They have become so sophisticated and demanding that, often, they know more about a product than the salesperson. In this aspect, there is nothing more embarrassing than a salesman being unconfident in front of a customer and trying to sell a product he/she is not familiar with. An uneducated answer will definitely cost the sale.

Sales people often fall in the trap of trying to impress the customer with too many options. However, no matter how educated today’s customers are, still they can be intimidated and confused if they are offered too many alternatives for a single product. Instead of being impressed, they will most likely be driven to the store next door. Customers should be asked on their expectations from the product. There are so many similar products in the market that can do pretty much the same job. For a successful sale, it is extremely important to understand what the customers are looking for and what is their primary intent for use of the product. By determining the customer’s primary uses and budget, staff can narrow down the number of products they can offer. By offering two options maximum, sale becomes simpler and customers can decide easier.

Another common sales error is presenting expensive products first. Any customer wants the best, high-end product and any salesman wants to sell the best product. This is often the result of high enthusiasm, but it may kill the sale if the customer doesn’t have the budget to back it up. Once customers realize they cannot afford the best, they might walk away and buy nothing at all because they don’t want to compromise for anything less than the best they have seen. It’s all a matter of human psychology. In this aspect, salespeople should first determine the budget of the customer in order to be able to choose two different products within the determined price range. Shooting for higher price products is a good thing, but it’s irreversible once a customer is hooked at the most expensive one.

Not inspecting the products before offering them to customers is another sales error. Simply grabbing a product and hand it on to a customer is a very bad first impression that can make the difference in a failing sale. Even high quality products won’t appear superior if they need to be adjusted, cleaned, or set properly. They will look like any other product that is thrown on the shelf. Staff should be trained to inspect all products before offering them to customers to be sure everything works properly.

Finally, many salespeople fall in the trap of talking too much. Generally, a salesperson should describe the product and answer any customer question. Other than that, when customers try the product or look at it and think where and how they can use it, it’s better to be left in silence so they concentrate and think if this product satisfy their needs after all. In other words, products have the great ability of selling themselves and therefore, distracting the customer with nonstop talking can definitely kill the sale.

Tips on giving an effective sales presentation

Anyone who is or has been involved in sales would agree that selling is not easy. To be an effective salesman, one has to be confident, persuasive and determined to talk the customer into buying the product. However, as customers nowadays are, not only more sophisticated, but they also try to save as much as they can, the job of salespeople becomes harder and harder in their effort to develop their sales potential to sell and make profits.

Sales presentations are valuable tools that help salesmen to present a firm’s products and services before a buying audience. Being, in effect, the first contact of consumers with the company, sales presentations shape consumers’ perceptions about a firm or a brand name. However, sales presentations are not plain PowerPoint files. They primarily involve the personality and character of the salesperson, which is reflected on the way the product or the service is presented. The way a salesman talks, moves around the room, answers questions and seems confident about the product he/she presents makes an effective sales presentation and can definitely enhance the reputation of a firm by shaping a high opinion about its products, services and people. Ultimately, this can lead to enhanced profitability and can make the firm really viable in the competitive marketplace.

There are certain rules that a salesperson should follow in order to give an effective sales presentation and manage to impress consumers in the hope of converting them into potential customers.

Rule #1: Have a comprehensive case

A sales presentation is useless if there is no case around which it evolves. Often, salespeople use a lot of data to support a story that, in reality, is not even there. It’s all about fiction; a fiction that customers get aware of and, ultimately, walk away of the sale. Without a comprehensive case, there is no point in making a sales presentation. By giving to clients information they already know will most likely overwhelm the presentation, forcing the audience to find out on their own what’s the big deal about it. This is, in effect, a kill sale.

Rule #2: Know the audience

Even the best salesmen with the highest sale records in the company cannot sell a product if they are not familiar with their audience. To be able to sell, they have to know what their customers need. The key to achieve that is to do a thorough research in the company’s website before the presentation to discover the customers’ business. However, as nothing is better than human contact, getting in touch with the company’s top management or public relations specialists will enable salespeople to get a deeper idea about the company’s vision and objectives. Prospect customers expect that salesmen can read behind the lines and understand what they are doing and what they need from a particular product or service. In this aspect, the sales presentation needs to be adjusted according to the client’s goals and objectives.

Rule #3: Use interaction

Even the most impressive presentation is boring if the salesperson does not involve the audience. Salespeople need to find ways to be creative and interactive so that customers respond to questions. In the process, new information about the product or the service is generated through interaction. This enables customers to determine the key factors that will eventually play the most important role in their decision to buy the product or not. Many salespeople use one of the most widely known advertising models, the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) model, which aims at attracting attention of customers, maintaining their interest, creating desire, and getting action.

Rule #4: Show professionalism

Many salespeople, although they may have a great sales presentation, they kill the sale by lacking professionalism.  They often forget that the very purpose of a sales presentation is to present effectively a product or a service in the aim of selling it and they just use the visual aid of PowerPoint to show a great case. However, a professional sales presentation requires analytical skills, steady and authentic voice, confident body posture, smile, interaction, and communication. Prospect clients expect enthusiasm, positive attitude, and authenticity so that they get convinced about the product and believe that everything they hear is true. This will open the door for a future cooperation and sales opportunities.

Rule #5: Keep it short

Lengthy presentations make audiences lose their interest. Salespeople should focus on the features and benefits of the product they aim to sell and keep their presentation short. Otherwise, customers will soon get disinterested and will get lost in numbers, slides and charts that will mean nothing more to them than a waste of their valuable time.

Overall, salespeople should love their job in order to be able sell the products and services of the company they represent. Being a salesman requires loving to be around people, meeting new people every day, interacting with them, be responsive, and establish long-term professional relationships. Otherwise, any effort to sell through a sales presentation will seem like fake and not genuine. Above all it requires genuine love for the profession of sales to make an effective sales presentation. It has to come from inside and to be improved with practice and persistence.

The concept of B2B sales

Business-to-business (B2B) is defined as the exchange of goods and services between businesses. In the B2B context, businesses cooperate in order to integrate business solutions and achieve the best possible business results.

B2B markets are totally differentiated than business-to-consumers (B2C) markets. B2B customers vary significantly in their consumption of products because they do not have the physical limitations that individual customers do. Besides, suppliers are organizations and not individual consumers and therefore, they are well aware of the products because they have performed a thorough market research and a price comparison before making their final buying decision.

To better illustrate how B2B functions, let’s assume that you own a publishing company with eight popular magazines titles. Your company had spent both time and money into creating distinct and appealing websites for each magazine, but did not use email to drive traffic to these websites. So, what you needed to do is to design a marketing campaign to inform consumers about your magazines websites.

Generally, to drive traffic to a website, you have to give consumers an incentive. In the plethora of websites and in the competitive marketplace of today, consumers do not have the time to surf around and look for the best website. They look for the website that offers them a little bit more than the others, usually a discount, a special offer or something similar. You have decided with your marketing team to offer consumers an exotic trip for two to a Hawaiian resort. So, you turned to the travel agency that you have been cooperating for the corporate travel of your firm and you arranged the details of the incentive trip to Hawaii. All consumers had to do was to visit the website, answer a couple of questions, give their contact details and press submit.

To design your marketing campaign and attract consumers you turned to an email and communications firm, specialized in using advanced technology to design graphically rich emails.

To reduce the percentage of undeliverable emails and make sure that your customers and a larger percentage of consumers will receive your offer, you cooperated with a local courier business in order to send out leaflets with your campaign.

The above example illustrates perfectly the philosophy of B2B. By closely monitoring marketing and sales procedures, firms realize increased productivity and savings, while they improve their business results. Besides, in the B2B context, businesses keep customer acquisition costs low and increase marketing and sales productivity by integrating sales and marketing to the creation of a single revenue pipeline.

The major driver of growth in the B2B context is technological revolution. Technological advancements happen at a swift pace and these changes speed up product and service developments. The Internet era in conjunction with sophisticated business strategies create the grounds for an integrated marketing strategy that incorporates both technology and organizational objectives. Besides, businesses adapt their marketing strategies to the competitive business environment of today and engage to innovation in order to discover new market segments and new customers for their products, while creating new sales and distribution procedures.

The importance of customer feedback on sales plans

Every year, businesses spend vast amounts of money into advertising and promotion of their products and services in order to improve their operational results and profitability and remain viable in the competitive marketplace. However, listening to their customers and know first-hand what their customers need is a fundamental of goof customer service that enables businesses to find out if their products do what they promise to do.

Customer feedback can provide a firm with the benefit of knowing beyond any doubt if customers are satisfied by using its products or services. Consumers enter a relationship with a firm in the hope of getting satisfied after using a particular product and generally, if their satisfaction is repeated and continuous it gets transformed into customer loyalty. Many businesses make the mistake of assuming that their customers are satisfied and base their service policies on such assumptions. However, when they realize they are off target, profits are declining and they start losing market share to competition, customers are further dissatisfied and at that point it is quite useless to use customer feedback in order to find out what went wrong and which product attribute did not meet their customers’ needs.

Not being in tune with customers is like being in a surreal situation. The way businesses think customers feel about their products may be totally wrong and this will most likely lead to ineffective market segmentation and product development, which eventually will have a major impact on the firm’s profitability and market share. On the contrary, by listening to customers’ needs and wants, businesses can customize their products and services to meet customer expectations and demands and ultimately be more successful.

Firms should be actively seeking for customer feedback and there are numerous ways to do that.

Customers can fill in a feedback form that can be mailed or delivered to their home or office address. The questions on the feedback form should be structured in a way that the customer is prompted to provide the right kind of information about the firm’s products or services.

Another type of customer feedback is to fill in an online form or to participate in an interactive forum. This type of customer feedback is ideally used when customers are in majority online customers.

Many firms use email- or phone-surveys to get customer feedback, but generally customers do not like this type of providing their opinion. Particularly, customers who are dissatisfied, feel like they are wasting their time by having to take these surveys as well.

Many businesses are afraid of customer feedback because they do not know how to handle customer complaints and negative opinions about their products or services. Businesses dislike negative comments, but it is better to get a negative feedback early, while there is still time for anticipation. For instance, if a firm introduces new services that aim to improve customer relationship management and customers do not like these services, the sooner the firm knows that, the better for its marketing strategies.

On the other hand, customer feedback is not always negative. Generally, customers are really happy to provide their opinion about a firm’s products and services and they are even happier to do so when they are satisfied by their relationship with the firm. Businesses that know what they are doing well, can save themselves from the trap of changing something their customers really like. This will facilitate their effort to fix their deficiencies and improve their end-product.

The key to making the most out of customer feedback is to pull all customer suggestions together and discover common patterns of customer behavior. In doing so, firms can provide better solutions to their existing customer and drive significant improvements to attract new customers. In any case, this is a win-win situation.

Moreover, firms need to make it easy and quick for customers to provide feedback. Customers value their time more than any company’s products or services. Therefore, they should be encouraged to provide feedback quickly and easily and, even better, anonymously so that they are more honest. Finally, customers should be appreciated for providing feedback. Any feedback, positive or negative, is valuable for the firm and therefore, customers should be compensated for their time and effort. Typically, customers get compensated with discounts or gifts for their feedback.

Overall, customer feedback is a way to keep contact with customers. Businesses that isolate themselves from their customers contribute to their own decline. On the contrary, businesses that take advantage of their environment have a chance of adapting to their customer needs and become more successful through increased sales and profitability.

How to start a career in pharmaceutical sales

Pharmaceutical sales jobs are the most rewarding and sought after career in sales. One of the most common reasons that people pursue such careers is that they offer flexibility, the ability to manage your own schedule and territory, the ability to travel all over the world in the most exotic places with all the expenses paid by the company, and above all, salaries and bonuses that range between $80,000 and $150,000 yearly. However, landing a job as a pharmaceutical sales representative requires quite a dedication and, most of all, love for the profession.

When you get interviewed for a pharmaceutical sales job, most likely, the first question you will be asked is “Why are you interested in pursuing a career in pharmaceutical sales”. This is a basic question for any type of job interview. Employers always begin an interview with “why are you interested in” and this is a straightforward question that requires a clear-cut answer.

First of all, as you would have answered for any other job position related to sales, the proper answer is that you love being a salesperson. If you already have an experience as a salesperson you should definitely mention it with examples, how you did the sale, how you convinced the customer into buying the product. In effect, you sell yourself to the employer during the interview. Without saying too much about yourself, you show you are an energetic, motivated and enthusiastic salesperson by telling the story of a previous sale that you have accomplished.

Then, you can explain why you think a career in pharmaceutical sales is right for you. This answer is two-fold. It involves both the characteristics of the pharmaceutical industry that would probably induce any salesperson to pursue a career and your personal traits that make you suitable for such a profession. Pharmaceutical industry is dynamic and demonstrates constant growth that offers to pharmaceutical sales professionals enormous opportunities for professional and personal growth. If you have spend some time in the field with a pharmaceutical sales representative to see first-hand what these people do, you should put it forward in the interview.

If you have decided to pursue a career in pharmaceutical sales after having done a thorough research in the field, you should explain it to the potential employer. Looking for this particular job for six months or more, will mean that you really feel like doing this job and you are a persistent individual that has specific career goals. Employers love to see candidates who are certain about their career objectives and feel like they are the right person for a particular job.

Overall, what you should have in mind when pursuing a career in the pharmaceutical sector is that pharmaceutical sales jobs reward knowledge, and tenacity. As a pharmaceutical sales representative you would spend most of your day on the road, visiting pharmacists, physicians, and hospital personnel to promote your company’s products and your sales volume. For every new product, you would spend a lot of time to learn its features and this would be like taking a pharmacology course. You would have to be familiar with the industry statistics, competition developments, and global data on a weekly basis. Admittedly, a career in pharmaceutical sales is a high-rewarding job, but it also requires a great deal of dedication, and readiness to make sacrifices for your career.

How to create a sales forecast

Sales forecasting is a key management tool for businesses. The more effective the sales forecasts are the more accurate the firm’s budgets will be, giving managers an accurate picture of future profitability and viability of the firm in the competitive marketplace.

Forecasting is broadly used by managers as a primary tool for predicting the volume of future sales and the level and type of future customer demand based on historical sales performance and projected market conditions. In this context, managers consider a wide spectrum of data for determining growing and profitable markets. Apart from customer demand, other variables used to produce sales forecasts are competitive strategies, pricing, research & development, advertising & marketing, processing times, supplier lead times, quality losses, technological changes and regulatory changes.

One of the major challenges in forecasting, as in most of business decisions, is the accurate prediction of customer demand. Forecasting customer demand is a difficult task, for the most part because the demand for goods and services varies greatly and is subject to seasonal and cyclical patterns that affect the level of demand for a firm’s products or services. In particular, seasonal patterns cause an increase or decrease in customer demand, depending on the time of day, week, month, or season. For instance, the peak hours for a call center of a large bank are between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM. The cyclical patterns of customer demand arise from influences in the business cycle that include factors that cause an economy to go from recession to expansion over a period of time. Business cycle movements are difficult to forecast because they are affected by political or economical developments on a national or a global level.

Typically, managers summarize the sales of the previous year into a chart and observe the monthly sales trends to identify the sales pattern. They notice months that sales are increased and months that sales are really low and they relate these trends to seasonal fluctuations that affect the company’s sales such as holiday periods, promotion periods and so on. However, the underlying trend is more or less the same and this allows them to follow a specific pattern when creating the sales forecast for the next year.

Generally, sales forecasts are based on latest sales trends; economic trends within the sector, industry, region or nation the firm operates; and competitive developments. The factors that are typically taken into consideration could be the launch of a new product, entering a niche market or expanding into new markets. The point for accurate sales forecasting is to be realistic and calculate numbers that are feasible, not numbers that would be ideal. For instance, if a firm plans to launch a new product and wants to promote it, it won’t make sense to calculate a profit of 30 percent from the distribution of flyers when, by default flyers generate no more than 5 percent. On the other hand, there are negative scenarios as well such as competitive developments. If competition is aggressive and controls distribution channels, managers should take into consideration this factor and adjust their estimates accordingly.

Forecasting methods can be based on mathematical models that use available historical data or quantitative methods that make use of managerial experience and customer judgments or they may be based on a combination of both methods.

The two basic forecasting methodologies are: (1) the bottom-up forecasting, that divides the market into segments and then calculates the demand per segment, and (2) the top-down forecasting that develops sales quota and sales forecasts based on sales potential estimates. Bottom-up forecasting is compiled with industry surveys and is highly subject to the accuracy of the answers of customers. Top-down forecasting is rather weak in its underlying assumptions, particularly when they are not supported by current economic conditions.

No matter which method is employed, forecasting methods vary significantly, mostly in their level of sophistication. Although managers can control the firm’s expenses to a certain extent, they cannot control at all the purchasing habits of consumers. However, a sales forecast must take into consideration a reasonable degree of reliability in order to accurate and timely.

In this context, forecasting is not simply accumulating and calculating numbers using mathematical models. Sales forecasting is the primary task of the sales and marketing team, but it requires the collaborative effort of all the departments in the organization. Sales and marketing people are close to customers and know their needs. However, all organizational departments need to work closely to avoid highly optimistic or highly pessimistic forecasts for the year.

For creating an accurate sales forecast, managers need to follow the following steps:

(1)   Determine why the need to develop a sales forecast

(2)   Classify the firm’s products into homogenous groups

(3)   Identify the factors that affect the sales of each product group and how important they are

(4)   Decide on the appropriate forecasting method to produce accurate forecasts

(5)   Gather and analyze data

(6)   Provide a set of assumptions based on which they will draw their estimates for several factors that cannot be measured

(7)   Translate their assumptions into specific forecasts about the firm’s products and services

(8)   Apply their forecasts to the firm’s operations

(9)   Review business performance periodically and revise their forecasts accordingly

 

Accurate sales forecasting incorporates a variety of factors that can influence customer demand. Such factors can be firm-related or market-related. In particular, managers consider the following factors when creating a sales forecast:

Business competence: the ability of a firm to respond to changing market conditions is subject to its marketing strategies, financing and management and how all these intertwine towards the maximization of its profit potential.

Business Positioning: the competitive position of a firm within the industry it operates it is considered in relation to its market share, research and development, pricing, brand name and quality of products. All these factors are also evaluated in relation to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Market Conditions: although sales forecast is based on market segmentation, the general market conditions are a key determinant of general sales volume and they need to be taken into consideration.

Seasonal trends: the analysis of monthly trends and seasonal variations over short- and long-term periods can provide managers with demand patterns that are being historically repeated over budget periods. Managers can take advantage of this information and increase sales discounts over slow periods, while generating new sales ideas through interaction with customers.

Overall, a sales forecast analyzes historical data based on a time line that is usually five to ten years. This period is enough to detect trends and patterns both in the expansion and the decline of dollar sales volume. Besides, the longer the time frame, the better the patterns follow cycles, enabling management to conclude if they are subject to significant societal developments that have influenced business performance or they are deviant variations that need to be adjusted in order to reflect normal trends under normal conditions.