Sometimes, winning business comes down to breaking the habits of your prospects.
It’s amazing to me how strongly habits can be formed in people. Take last Tuesday morning for an example. I’m a member of a breakfast networking club here in Kansas City, and when I’m in town I attend as much as possible. On this particular Tuesday, our club was meeting at a different location than usual. Now, I knew this. I’d been reminded of it multiple times. Still, on Tuesday morning, as is my habit, I drove right to our normal location – and remembered as I pulled into the parking lot that the location had changed. Well, to make a long story short, some rather remarkable driving got me to the changed location. But it started me thinking about how difficult it can be to break some habits.
Let’s be clear, though. The habits I’m talking about aren’t YOUR habits – we talk about those a lot. This time I’m talking about your CUSTOMER’s habits. Specifically, I’m talking about your customers’ nagging and annoying habit of not buying from you. Now, are you interested? See, what salespeople fail to realize is that often, getting prospects or customers to move their business to you has less to do with relationships than with habits.
“Take-away” selling can be the most difficult selling of all; that is, selling to break a current customer relationship. Often, we make it more difficult by misunderstanding the nature of that relationship. Essentially, there are three different kinds of buying relationships:
- Occasional buyer: The buyer shops every purchase and buys when it most suits him/her.
- Habitual buyer: The buyer doesn’t shop and uses you (or your competitor) as the “default source” of product, but has no real affinity or loyalty. They buy from you because you’re who they buy from. Of course, in many cases, one mistake costs you the business.
- Loyal customer: The customer has a real affinity for you (or your competitor). The customer identifies with you, wants you to prosper, and is willing to evangelize for you. This is the type of relationship we all seek because these relationships will withstand the occasional hiccup – and hiccups are pretty much inevitable.Here’s the key: When salespeople assess customer relationships – both their own and those of their competitors – they tend to overestimate their quality and depth. Between #2 and #3, far more relationships fall into the #2 category, but salespeople tend to estimate that far more of them fall into the third category. This is a big mistake, because this causes us to both take our own relationships for granted, but to take the wrong selling approach against those of our competitors’.
Since most of those relationships simply boil down to habit; i.e. “We buy from ABC Company because that’s who we buy from,” selling against those relationships boils down to breaking habits, not trying to displace loyal and carefully tied customer relationships. Now that doesn’t sound so difficult, does it? Of course, breaking those relationships requires a few techniques that I teach in my sales training programs:
- Assess the quality of the relationship. This one requires guts, because the questions you ask are the same ones you should be asking to assess your own customer relationships. Asking about mistakes the competitor has made, whether your customer has referred your competitor, etc. are key questions. Tough? Yep – but nothing good comes without a bit of risk.
- Rewind the clock. Ask how that relationship originated; what was the key to that company becoming the default source?
- Ask for a ruling. Ask your prospect to give your business proposition the same consideration that originally won the business for the other guys. On an even, value vs. value field, who wins?
NOTE: This technique can – and does – break habitual relationships. It can’t – and doesn’t – break truly loyal relationships, so your most important work is the work you put in to assess the quality of the relationship. Once again, it all comes back to the questions you ask.
