Customer Centered Selling: Four Important Steps

Customers must be at the heart of any sales process.  I have discussed in previous blogs about relational selling versus transactional selling.  Transactional selling is not customer centered, by definition.  For a transactional salesperson getting the order is more important than doing right for the customer; meeting sales goals supersedes making the customer happy.  Relational selling is customer centered. Relational salespeople know that they will live with the results of the sale and therefore they make sure the customer is well-served.
Everything these days is becoming "customer centered".  Netflix "learns" what you like to watch and features the programs similar to ones that you have watched in the past.  Amazon "learns" your buying history and "suggests" things that you might like.  The future of selling is knowing your customer better than your competition does and being able to use that knowledge to service them better, to make sure your customer gets the solution that is best for their needs.
Four things to do before making your first sales call on a new customer or even your second and third call on an old customer:
1.  Look up the company on Manta (www.manta.com).  This will give you an overview of the company's ownership and number of employees.
2.  Go to the company's website.  If there's an "About" tab, click on it.  Learn everything you can about the company--websites are great sources of insight into the company's culture, no matter how large or small the organization.
3.  Go to LinkedIn and look up the company's president and any of the people that you're meeting with.  LinkedIn gives tremendous insight into a person's interest, if they are keeping up their profiles.
4.  Check other social media outlets to get even more insight.  Does the company have a Twitter feed? A Facebook page? 
Putting yourself into a selling situation without knowing everything you can about the customer you're trying to sell is like coming up to bat with a broomstick.  You may hit the ball, but you've reduced your odds by a whole lot.
Do your homework.  Get to know your customer before making your pitch and tailor the pitch to his needs.