Understand the customer
Nies firmly believes that successful selling is not about promoting and telling customers what they need. Value-based selling or value-based providing, as he calls it, is about understanding the clients’ wants and how you can best serve those. Nies created an internal university called Understanding U to get that message across to his employees.
“That training or learning environment focuses totally on the need to understand what we’re trying to do and what customers want,” he says. “How do you help them buy what they want rather than try to sell them what we have? We try to stretch this understanding and inquiry mode of operation as broadly throughout the company as we can at every level. Because I believe we need a collective leadership at our business rather than leadership from the top or any particular group or person.”
There are two overriding requirements to successfully practice value-based providing in complex environments. You need to gain credibility with the client and understand their needs.
“One of these is the need to gain the credibility and the trust of the other, which builds their confidence that the values that are suggested or offered will be successfully gained without inordinate risk or cost and that they can be quickly gained,” Nies says. “The second theme is that understanding the other person’s wants and needs is essential. The explicit values they desire can be identified and established.
“An effective selling strategy is not about grand design or clever tricks or flashy presentations or good closing tactics. Rather, it’s about thoroughly understanding the customers’ perspective, their motives, their fears, their uncertainties, their wants, their needs and dissatisfactions, and how they may differently react at various stages of their choosing cycle. Then [you have] to understand how best to respond to each concern and to understand how to help resolve every issue and worry in ways (that) consistently build an increased trust in confidence.”
To ensure employees understand the complexity of reading customers, Nies developed a training program that includes reading materials, role playing and team collaboration. For example, after a topic is discussed, each team presents its idea of what that topic meant, how it should be applied and ways to better handle the situation.
Nies started with his direct reports and then oversaw the process as they facilitated the course for the next level of employees. Courses not only focus on sales but also on management, technical support and engineering. The hope is for between 30 and 40 percent of employees to partake in Understanding U by the end of this year and for participation to be continuous.
“We say that we learn forward, but we only understand backward,” Nies says. “We have to have certain knowledge before we can begin to understand. Understanding U is a means to connect the learning, connect the knowledge that we have and show how everything fits together and to do that on the basis of discovery rather than lectures.”
