Why do customers choose to work with one business over another? What makes a company more attractive than others or service stand out from its competitors? The answers to these questions are what sales teams strive to find. If you know why someone’s working with you instead of another company, you know what your advantage is. You know what makes you stand out, and you can begin playing to those strengths. Likewise, if you know why customers are flocking to a competitor, you’re better able to understand what your weaknesses are and where you need to improve.
Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to see why you stand out, especially if you’re a relatively new business that doesn’t have years of data to analyze. Another challenge is that your business may stand out to different customers for different reasons, including negative ones. Let’s take a look at some of the reasons why customers decide to work with a company and how Scaling Sands can help you get their attention.
Customers Work with Businesses that Address their Needs
One of the main reasons customers select vendors or suppliers is because that business meets their needs. When a business needs a SaaS solution, they want to work with a provider that is going to offer everything they need. If your company can’t do that, it’s likely they will look elsewhere. Even if you can meet some of their needs, most customers don’t want to work with multiple vendors when they can find one that can do everything for them.
Your Marketing Needs to Target the Right Businesses with the Right Message
Sometimes, the roadblock preventing an interested customer from converting into a paying customer isn’t the product you’re offering—it’s the marketing surrounding it. If you don’t market your brand and your services correctly, it’s possible you’re not reaching the right customers. Targeting the wrong customers will drastically reduce your conversion rate. Sales training isn’t enough to overcome this issue because it’s a foundational problem.
However, even if you target the right customers, you still need to make certain your message is correct. This means you need to understand potential customers’ goals, challenges, needs, and wants. If you don’t, you may give the impression that you don’t offer the solutions they need, even if you do. Your website content, social media posts, and other marketing materials need to be comprehensive and cohesive in order to accurately advertise your services and provide potential customers with all of the information they need to make a choice.
Quality is Important
If your products aren’t of sufficient quality, customers are likely to work with you for a very short time. Once they determine that you’re using sub-par materials, they’re likely to step away in favor of a competitor. Quality isn’t just in physical products, either. Even if you’re a SaaS company, you still have to focus on quality. In this case, it’s typically the quality of your customer service and technical support. You need to offer your clients the support they need when they need it or risk losing them.
Budget Often Trumps Everything
Some customers do choose a business based on cost. They may have a very limited budget and only be able to work with businesses that help them stretch every dollar. That doesn’t mean you should ever devalue your products or services. You always need to recoup your investment and turn a profit. However, you will want to conduct market research to determine the price point of similar products or services so you can accurately gauge what customers are willing to pay. Recoup your costs and add a profit margin, but be aware of where customers draw the line.
How Can You Become a Business Customers Choose to Work With?
The question, of course, is how you can become a business that customers want to work with. It’s easy to say that all you need to do is meet their needs, market your brand correctly, offer high-quality products and services, and be affordable. Of course, it’s not that simple. In fact, even aiming to meet these four elements isn’t quite as easy as it seems.
The first step to helping customers choose your business over a competitor begins with data.
Identify the Symptoms Customers Are Facing
Customers are looking to work with other businesses for one reason: they have a problem and need someone to solve it. This problem may be as simple as needing a company to host a cloud server or SaaS partner, or it could be something complex such as needing to outsource all of their IT needs.
If they know what issues they’re facing, it’s often easy to meet them. However, sometimes they have a problem they don’t fully understand or realize exists. When that occurs, you have to look at the symptoms. Maybe they’re losing money every month, or perhaps their productivity isn’t what it should be. The business’s leaders may identify these as problems, but they’re really symptoms. Why is productivity low? Why is the company in the red every month? Identifying the symptoms and then working backwards to the problem will help you design solutions that work and that attract customers.
Identity Where They’re Trying to Go
Once you know the symptoms and underlying problems a customer has, you need to know what their goal is. Where are they trying to go? Many CEOs would say they want to make a specific amount of profit a year or have a certain number of customers. As with symptoms, you often have to work these goals backwards to determine exactly what is needed to reach them.
Become the Bridge
Determining what a customer needs to address their problems and get to where they want to go is your task. This is what you have to solve. How do you help a customer grow? What do you do to improve their productivity? Each customer needs a bridge to reach their goal, and it’s up to you to provide that bridge. It can be a service, a product, or a combination of both. In some cases, it can even be a strategy or a consultation that helps improve business strategy or methods.
Understanding a customer’s problems and their goals allows you to build the bridge they need. Your bridge may be exactly what many businesses need without any major changes, or you may need to offer customized bridges that address each customer’s specific needs. It all depends on your industry and what you offer.
Scaling Sales Can Help you Identify Customer Symptoms, Problems, and Goals
Learning what customers need and how you can best provide a solution to meet that need isn’t always easy. Building a sales funnel that captures potential customers, shows them that you can address their problems and help them achieve their goals, and provides them with all of the tools needed to convert to paying customers takes work, just as much work as building the perfect product. It’s also just as important. It doesn’t matter what type of product or service you offer if no one knows about it.
If you’re in need of learning more about sales management, Scaling Sales is here for you. Reach out today to learn more.
