Be a problem solver
Aggressiveness is not the key to pleasing your customer. It may help you make a sale, but if it’s not something that a particular customer really wanted, he or she probably wouldn’t return to buy additional products from you.
“Knowing your product and knowing how it fits in with your customer is the name of the game,” Cahn says. “In the long run, the solicitor of your product, the more he knows about his product and the need of his customers, the better salesman he will be.”
Cahn recalls a business trip he made shortly after he got married that illustrates his philosophy about what constitutes a true win for a salesperson.
“My wife asked me, ‘Did you have a good trip?’” Cahn says. “I said, ‘I don’t know.’ She said, ‘Did you sell anything?’ I said, ‘Oh yeah, I sold something.’ So she said, ‘Well, then you had a good trip.’ I said, ‘No. Did my customer sell it or get good use out of it?’ Selling again is just part of business. It’s part of life. Being able to sell doesn’t mean that the product will be successful with who you sold it to or whether you’ll have a happy camper. … Selling is an art and a skill. It’s not the act of tuning into your customer to get him to favor you. It’s whether the product you sell to your customer, it’s that he’s doing better with your product than with the next guy’s product.”
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about making a sale.
“Of course we want to make a sale,” Cahn says. “But if you don’t have the product an informed customers needs, you can’t make it. That happens all the time. If it happens often enough, I’ll be out of business.”
So how do you avoid such a fate?
“If you find out that you don’t have that product, as soon as that customer walks out, you’re going to try to work it out somehow,” Cahn says. “If it’s a common thing this customer is asking for, try to create that product for the next customer because he’s not the only one who is going to walk in looking for that product.
You need to work with your people to teach them to be aware and to keep their eyes and ears open to clues that customers provide about what product they are looking for.
“Management stays in touch with management of the companies we serve,” Cahn says. “There is a free flow of information both ways. We, of course, measure it by the amount of business we get from one year to the next or from one season to the next. When we visit customers, we study what they are doing and are pretty much aware of what the needs are for us.”
Talk to your employees about your product. Involve them in the developmental stage to see if it matches what they are seeing on the front lines as far as the desires of the market or the retailers to which you’re distributing your product. It’s these kinds of discussions that you need to have to ensure that customers keep coming back to buy your product.
“We bring them together and listen to what their needs are and tell them what our feelings are and work it out together,” Cahn says of the partnership between management and employee or retailer to best serve the market’s needs.
“We show them where we feel the future lies and how they feel about it and we sort of put it together and see whether that’s the product that is needed.”
