Empathize with your salesperson
Businesses should relook at sales strategy and indices if they want to design a great customer buying experience because customers are no more relying on sales to know about your product /services.
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
As Service Designers, we are often working with businesses to improve the experiences within their customer journey. The buying experience is amongst the first few touchpoints that help businesses to communicate with people regarding the value they are adding in each of their lives. Hence sales is a key channel for customers to understand the brand and its value proposition.
But what do customers really think about when they interact with sales?
To answer this question, I turned to Daniel. H Pink, an influential voice in the evolving landscape of sales and persuasion. In his book, ‘To Sell is Human’ he shares a survey result to the following question —
When you think of “sales” or “selling”, what’s the first word that comes to mind?
The most common response that he received was money, pitch, marketing, and persuasion. He even shared a word cloud of all the adjectives that he encountered-
The negative words reflect people’s discomfort and distaste with respect to sales and salespeople. Why is that? Further reading and dwelling in his lectures, I realized that the emotion with respect to sales as a profession in our mind is reflective of those whose practices revolve around duplicity, double-dealing, trickery…….
Even today when a customer receives a sales call or a followup, we have never acknowledged the call and replied — “ Thank you for calling and following up with us” instead what we do is either block, not pickup or cut the call the moment we realize it is a sales call!
Then when exactly do customers like us require a sales representative? This question leads me to the paper that was published in 1970— ‘The Market for Lemons — Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism’ published by George Akerlof, an economic professor from UC Berkeley. He illustrates using the analogy of used car markets that we are in an asymmetrical information economy.
Let me breakdown asymmetrical information, it means that the seller has more information than the buyer. Hence customers are dependant on the salesperson to make a purchase decision.
Hmmmm… does this hold true in 2020 as well? Clearly no!
We live in a world with excess information
With time our brain has the ability to tune out information that is unnecessary for us.
This is exactly what customers today are doing in order to protect themselves from a sea of sales and marketing content. Being a customer ourselves, we all go out and research to find all the points that help us confirm why we need to buy the product or avail the service, right?
Today as Service Designers, when we map out the customer journey, it is very evident that we are not in an asymmetrical world. Customers have more or equal amount of information as the salesperson.
We feel more empowered, skeptical, and are mostly driven by peers or other customers who have similar needs to fulfill. The access to information to the buyer has its own set of problems -
If we are a cautious buyer, we are always looking for a low review to figure out an issue or a pain point with a product or a service, so that we can bring this up when talking to the salesperson and challenge their product/service.
If we are an emotional buyer and have already created an opinion to buy a product/service, we are looking for information that would confirm our purchase decision.
In both cases due to excess information, the customer could be reading or biasing their opinion based on false information, marketing, or customer reviews.
Then how can salespeople add to the customer buying experience?
This is a very tricky situation to deal with because most customers interact with sales after having formulated certain assumptions and beliefs about the product. Information shared by the sales representative plays as a confirmation bias to the purchase decision that a customer has already made.
Crafting customer experience through a typical sales strategy is one of the toughest processes dealt with by a Service Designer. This is because customers are not expecting to deal with pushy salespeople but on the other hand, businesses set KPIs for sales ( eg: total number of followups per sales rep) that indirectly influence them to be pushy towards customers for feedback, followups, and availing the product!
In order to help customers build the narrative as to why do they need the product or service, sales representatives play a very critical role in retail spaces.
When I often walk into business meetings, every Managing Director talks about building an omnichannel customer experience. But, we never discuss changing the age-old sales strategies or looking for different kinds of skillsets when hiring a Sales team- like patience, problem identification, or empathy for that matter!
The new Key Performance Index for sales representatives should be their ability to empathize with customer’s needs and offering them a solution. It should no more be dependant on the number of follow-up calls but their effort in community building in order to help customers interact with others who have similar needs, goals, and wants.
As a Service Designer, we always talk about “The Buying Experience”. But, in order to have a seamless experience for the customers, the experience for salespeople and other POCs customers interact with needs to be re-defined.
If you are new to Service Design and would like to explore the work scope for a Service Designer at a Startup, MNC or a Design Studio in India, check out my book Navigating Service Design.
Please feel free to write to me (juneza.niyazi@gmail.com) if you have other ideas or methods that you tested and succeeded or failed at. Don’t forget to clap if you appreciate the article!
