Building on the issues raised in my previous post entitled “Why Nobody Responds to Your Translation Sales Emails”, I would like to explore how a bit of curiosity about your customers could help improve your response rates to all your communications.
Curiosity is one of the greatest sales tools at our disposal. If the folks targeting me had been the least bit curious, they would have made the effort to learn something about me and worked out my potential needs for translation services rather than serving their desire to sell me services I don’t need.
Curiosity about our customers–what makes them tick, how they use our services, the challenges they face and the goals they are trying to achieve–gets conversations going. Curiosity is the foundation for establishing a connection. Curiosity elicits questions and questions elicit answers and information, information we need to find out how our services might help them. We can’t know how best to help potential customers without finding out more about them.
Curiosity for it’s own sake isn’t enough. Curiosity with intention means asking good, relevant questions and ones that elicit more than one-word answers. Good questions come from our research into the prospect’s industry, company and role, along with our understanding of how our services can help them. Asking questions gives prospects the space to raise issues they are worried about. Bigger questions and open-minded exploration give the prospect the opportunity to tell you something different from what you are expecting and help you build a unique and more targeted value proposition than your competitor…simply because you uncovered more and better information to help the prospect solve bigger problems. This is especially important when targeting higher level decision makers.
So, what does this look like? Since I’m currently in the UK, I might as questions specific to this market such as:
How is Brexit impacting your international revenue? Has it changed the markets you are targeting? How has this impacted your needs for language services? What new challenges are you facing with international customers?
How has Covid-19 impacted your international business/operations/marketing? Which markets is it impacting the most? How are you addressing this?
This is our responsibility as salespeople. Too many of us expect the customer to discern the value we offer on their own. This is lazy, closed-minded and a very, very boring way to sell. Why be boring when you can be interesting, interested, smart and engaging?
So, learn about your customers and develop a set of good questions on things THEY are likely to be concerned about. LISTEN carefully to their answers for this is where you will find the reasons they will want to buy from you.
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