If you read my post the other day, “Are You Helping or Selling?” you understand how I feel about solving your customers’ problems instead of just trying to sell them something. Not everyone agrees, however. Perhaps you said to yourself, “This doesn’t apply to us. Our customers know what they want.” One reader, who would understandably like to remain anonymous, fears that will be the boss’ reaction. What do you say when your boss reacts this way?
As human beings, we try to be rational, but it’s very hard for us to get away from our own personal experience. Usually, relying on our experience is extremely rational. It protects us in many situations, but sometimes it leads us astray, and this is unfortunately one of those times.
Imagine that your store was located in a hard-to-find location and you never gave anyone directions. You could watch every customer walk into your store and tell yourself, “Look at all these customers that come here with no directions—why do we need to bother with them?” You are only serving the ones that can find you without directions, so of course they don’t need directions, but what about everyone else?
Likewise, if every customer you see already knows your company and the products you sell, it doesn’t mean that you have no need to adopt problem-oriented helpfulness in your selling. Rather, it means that, because you have no helpful information available, people that need help are going elsewhere. The only ones that can find you are the ones that don’t need any help.
So when your boss says, “Our target market just knows what they want,” you need to ask, “How do you know?” If the proof is experiential or anecdotal rather than based on any testing you’ve done, it’s time to run a test. Likewise, my anonymous reader wrote, “I still believe that as we deal in many parts that are out of production or have other unique features, there are at least some customers who only have a slight idea what they want that could be converted earlier.” I suspect that’s true, but we still need to test it. If you’re willing to test what you think versus what the boss thinks, you have a chance of winning. Otherwise, it’s a standoff of opinions. And opinions are like necks—everybody has one. What we need is data.
So even though they say experience is the best teacher, it’s not the perfect teacher. Usually we can trust our experience to yield the right answer, but we should continually question our experience in something as new as Web marketing. Testing our assumptions usually yields the better decision.
