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I am not advocating the Basil Fawlty approach to business by suggesting that you should look down your nose at customers, so as to get up their noses. Instead, I am recommending the use of a military strategy, which involves seeing a battle zone from an elevated viewpoint, so as to be in a better position to fight more wisely and effectively.In the course of each year I meet countless numbers of sales people, and the great majority see the daily selling battle from aground level perspective…which always leads to false impressions and therefore to misconceived action. I should add that the sales people are usually not wrong in their perceptions; it is simply a case of encountering ‘enemy fire’ so to speak…and most sales people do not carry weapons to match those that are used by customers. For example, a sales person could talk to a customer for 10minutes in an effort to ‘get a sale’, but the customer only needs to say ‘no’ to cause an immediate retreat! Here are some typical battle scenes that faze sales people, based on customer comments, followed by an aerial view of the same ‘incident’…

• “Customers are only interested in cheaper prices.” The aerial view of this problem shows that since customers can access the products and services they want from many suppliers, they correctly use price to feather their own nests…and as a tactic to keep suppliers at bay. However, a view from even higher ground shows that customers are far less concerned with ‘getting better deals’ than they are with achieving better results for their businesses, and that to find strategies for growth they turn to ‘external specialists’…rather than to suppliers. An example is that companies selling business insurance often hear customers say they can buy insurance cheaper, when in fact the real problem is that most customers are under-insured! The lesson is that salespeople must be armed with ways to sell productivity, and not just products. This marketing maneuver not only beats price opposition, it creates more demand for products!

• “The customers say they can’t afford our product, or the solution we recommend.” This reality reflects a limitation at market level, but the aerial outlook also reveals the failure of suppliers to help ‘facilitate the purchase’ for customers. An example is an Optometry Practice that offers to help customers to spread payments over six months, when faced with buying lenses that cost more than the wrong ones they are currently using! If you are aiming to sell a proposition that involves more cost on the way to greater satisfaction, then you owe it to your company and to the customers to ‘create a professional path to an acceptable form of buying’.

• “The customers say they are happy with their current suppliers.” This impediment, as seen by sales people, looks different from the higher vantage point…signifying that the customer, when faced with offerings that are a duplication, prefers to ‘stay with the devil he knows.’ This situation can be easily changed by respecting how the customer has purchased in the past, and then showing how he can achieve much better results in the future…starting tomorrow. An example is a sales person selling consumer finance who won a new multiple retail account, by asking permission to work in just one outlet to show that much better business results could be produced. He showed the staff in the store how to sell insurance (against default of payment) with each purchase using finance, which raised that shop’s strike rate by several hundred percent, which in turn earned him the new account in total. So, sales people need to be armed with propositions that offer business progress, not just product change.

Then there are the endless tactics used by customers to stop the advance of sales people…like ‘We’d like to sleep on it’, or ‘’We’ll talk It over’, or ‘We’ve decided to put this matter on hold’, etc. These diversionary ‘lines’ mean “Your story is of no interest to us at all.’ As a senior manager some years ago, I worked with a board of clients and this key connection allowed me to understand that what customers say to suppliers is one thing, and what they really need from suppliers is very different.