The Not So Secret Secret About Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a hot topic. Thousands of articles present their “secret decoder rings” about customer engagement. Sales and marketing people get into serious conversations about customer engagement. Lots of it is excellent stuff, but I always wonder, “What’s all the fuss about?”
In some way, there seem to me to be a couple of fundamentals to customer engagement:
- Get the customers to talk about themselves, what they do, and what they want to do.
- Talk to customers about what they want to talk about.
People like talking about themselves and what they do. They like to have an consultation that is genuinely interested in them. They listen to things they are interested in.
If it’s so simple, why is it so hard for sales people to do? I reckon there are a bunch of reasons:
- The same rules apply to us, we like talking about ourselves, we like talking about what we do. What makes it worse, is that we’ve been professionally trained to do this, so the urge to pitch, present our products, talk about our solutions overwhelms us. We take over the conversation and place our mouths into autopilot.
- We’re goal directed and focused on winning deals. Part of what makes sales people fantastic is the overwhelming desire to win–to close the deal. Point us to a customer, we’ll charge yet to be, 200mph (330+kph for some of you). We want to achieve our goals.
- We’re time pressured, we have more to get done than we have time to do it. We jump to action, trying to go deals aggressively through the funnel. The talk button gets pushed, and we go.
Focusing on what the customer is interested in and talking to them about that is the secret to customer engagement. When we let the customer talk about their issues and goals, when they can tell us their problems, when we probe to know how these issues impact them, we engage them. Reckon about when someone has done this with you. Suddenly you reckon, “Here’s a person interested in me and what I have to say,” “Here’s someone that really wants to know my point of view,” “Here’s someone who is telling me things I am interested about–that can help me.”
Things change when we’ve engaged the customer. We get into conversations where we are really listening to each other. The relationship deepens, entrust levels go up.
Engaging the customer makes our job of selling much simpler. First, the customer has laid out a road map for us–they’ve told us what they are trying to do, what alternatives they are considering, how they will make the choice. All we have to do is respond to what they’ve said, demonstrating our solution is superior to all other alternatives.
Engaging the customer isn’t really that hard, it’s putting them first, being interested in them and what concerns them, and encouraging them to talk about it.