How to Create A Positive Impression with a Buyer

How do you get a buyer to view you not as someone selling them something, but a trusted resource that they value and look forward to talking to? There are various communication and related techniques that will move you closer each day to holding this coveted place in a buyer’s mind.

“There are various communication and related techniques that will move you closer each day to holding this coveted place in a buyer’s mind.” 

So how do you get a customer to value you and your company regardless of what you are selling. Here are some techniques.

• Make sure the Customer Knows You Won’t Take Too Much Time. Use time to put the customer at ease. It’s an effective tactic for building customer engagement given how busy people are and the risk they perceive when you threaten to take too much of their time. This is especially true when people feel like a company or another person is trying to market or sell something to them.
  • Marketing. For marketing, this means making ads, content, and other communication tools easy to consume. Recent research into the types of content and media that customers like to consume supports this point. It shows that people are attracted to content that is easy to consume more than they value the substance of the content itself.
  • Sales. For sales, this technique can be used to put the customer at ease during phone calls and in-person meetings. At the start of a meeting or conversation, sales people should articulate how long the meeting will last, an objective for the meeting, and a clear agenda that shows the customer that you will stay within the time limit.
• Show How Accommodating You Are With Non-Verbal Tools. The basic idea here is to look non-threatening. Body posture, facial cues like smiling, and the handshake are all important non-verbal communication techniques. These non-verbal cues are obviously critical to sales people and most good sales people already know the benefits of a smile and a good handshake. More advanced non-verbal cues involve tilting your chin down slightly to look less threatening and angling your body slightly away from the customer.
• Slow Down The Rate at Which You Present Information.Speaking slowly and pausing to allow customers to catch up to what you’re saying is certainly important, but there are other forms of communication, such as the amount of information we include on a presentation slide, where this technique can pay dividends as well. This tip can help sales and marketing build engagement with customers.
  • Marketing. For marketing, communicating slowly also involves presenting information in a way that highlights the key points you want the customer to retain. Think of great ad or landing page copy. Limiting the amount of copy and structuring the presentation of that content so that it’s easy to digest is one of the most important things you can do.
  • Sales. For sales, it’s important to remember that buyers are unlikely to remember more than three things from any conversation you have with them.
• Ask the Customer How You Can Help Them and Then Do It. One of the most effective ways to engage a customer is to ask a simple, but powerful question: what can I help you with? The best way to engage a customer is to simply ask how you can help the customer in an altruistic manner and then do it.
• Put The Customer’s Wants, Needs and Perceptions Ahead of Your Own. In this day and age, you would think that every sales and marketing professional would understand how important it is to suspend their ego and make the customer the priority. In practice, very few people do this, but it’s one of the most important things we can do to engage the customer. Suspending your ego is nothing more complex than putting other individuals’ wants, needs, and perceptions of reality ahead of your own. This technique can make specific sales and marketing tactics more effective. For example, sales people should ask the customer to tell their “story” first. It not only makes the customer feel important and valued; it allows you to tailor what you communicate to the customer later on.
• Validate the Customer by Listening and Affirming What You Hear. The simple act of listening to the customer can create engagement because is validates what the customer is saying. You can take validation a step further by affirming what the customer is saying. This technique also helps us understand what the customer wants. Sales people can put this technique into practice by making sure that they listen to the buyer during conversations. Good sales people flip this and engage in “active” listening, making sure that they truly understand the customer’s priorities and affirming many of the customers ideas.
• Ask The Customer Follow Up Questions In The Form Why, How, And When . Asking people to explain what they’re saying by asking follow up questions is a great way to engage them. Questions such as “tell me why that’s important to you” go a long way towards making the customer feel valued. Of course, in a sales context, the answers to these questions can also provide really useful information. These questions are great qualifying questions that can help you understand the customer’s intent to purchase your product or service. Just remember not to ask these questions as if they are qualifiers. Try to ask them because you are genuinely interested in the answers. You should also try to ask them as a natural part of the conversation.
• Start The Conversation By Giving A Little Information That’s Relevant To The Customer . Many times, the customer isn’t willing to start the conversation with marketing or sales. In situations like these, you’ll need to provide some information about yourself, your company, and your product to get started. This is a quid pro quo. You give the customer something so that they’ll give you something in return. Giving a little information about you will help alleviate some of the issues.” The best way for sales and marketing to use this technique is to share information about yourself, your company, or product using the voice of other customers. Use language such as, “some of my other customers faced this same issue and here’s how they handled it…” You’re sharing information in a way that is highly relevant to the buyer and will get the buyer to start sharing information with you.
• Use Gift Giving As A Way To Build Customer Engagement. Gift giving is one of the cornerstones of building rapport with people. Remember that, when building rapport, the vast majority of gifts that you give will be non-material. It’s easy to give customers gifts, particularly in this day when the gift of information can be so valuable to a customer and so easy to deliver. The number of gifts that sales and marketing can offer a customer is truly astounding. Some of these gifts take traditional forms like pricing discounts, but increasingly these gifts are taking the form of information that helps customers. In B2B marketing, content marketing is all the rage. Good content marketing is essentially about providing a gift to a customer in the form of information that helps the buyer do their job better.
• Manage The Customer’s Expectations Proactively. Good sales people know that managing the customer’s expectations is an effective sales technique. This is an effective rapport-building technique. It’s not just about managing the customer’s expectations of what the product or service will do; it’s about managing their expectations for the conversation itself. The individuals in life that are able to either mask their agenda or shift the agenda to something altruistic will have great success at building rapport.” One good way to do this is to articulate your expectations for a conversation or meeting with a customer and see if the customer agrees with you. This can be done when setting the agenda for the meeting.

When a sales person wakes up genuinely thinking about the needs of the customer, and can communicate in such as way that this is evident, customers understand that they have someone in their corner as opposed to trying to sell them one.