Account Management - Trusted Advisor

Do people see you as a trusted advisor?

From a salesperson’s point of view, potential clients begin as a list of names. At the end of the day those names are thought of as potential dollars. Sometimes what they really are gets lost in the quest for more sales.

But if you adjusted your perspective towards your clients, you can not only make more sales but help more people in the process. The change comes first with recognizing that those potential clients are actually real people with real life problems – problems that they are willing to pay to get resolved. Keeping this in mind is an important part of of your recipe for success.

The next step is to realize that you also have a specific set of skills that is unique to you. Those skills are your experience helping similar types of clients. If your product or service is in a narrow niche you may already know this, but what if you are selling has broader applications? In that case, you may want to shift your perspective and look at who your customers are and how you can use your experience with each of your clients to help another.

This is one way that you will set yourself apart with your clients from the competition. It goes beyond just creating and developing your unique selling proposition. But it’s difficult to make this shift in how you approach your clients. You’ve likely been trained to focus on the unique selling proposition of your company and told that it will set you apart.

You can really stand out by making prospective clients know that you understand that they are unique.

Setting yourself apart includes taking advantage of personal skills, experience and expertise. Look at your prospect list and compare it to your list of past clients. There are likely similarities there. There are probably several prospective clients with the same concerns as past clients, concerns that go beyond the application of your product.

This is a secret part of selling that I have found to be key to success. You should find that clients business interesting enough for you to learn what value you can bring to that business.

Stress this to your client and suddenly you are looking different then other salespeople with a similar product.

The rewards are that you’ve just elevated your expert status in the eyes of your clients.

You’ve just demonstrated that you are uniquely qualified because of this experience and that will instantly set you apart from the competition that is still using a blanket approach to selling their product.

It’s a subtle shift in your selling technique but it is an effective one. There is no better (or easier) way to set yourself apart from the competition then to highlight your unique experience. This is not what happens most of the time with sales calls. Usually, the salesperson gets caught up extolling the virtues of the product.

Prospects not only want to know the solution, but they want to know how the solution applies to them specifically.

Instead, they usually get a long list of benefits—many of which apply to them, but also many that don’t.

You can fix this by taking the time to know your clients. Stop looking at them and seeing dollar signs and start seeing them as real people with real—unique—problems to which you have the solution. Then start figuring out how your product can help each client specifically.