SALES - Finding What Your Customer Wants

SALES – Finding What Your Customer Wants


By Nikki Viljoen – Viljoen Consulting CC November 2009.

The easiest sales usually come about with the right kind of marketing and quite frankly I was not really sure where to put this particular article – there is such a huge divide between sales, marketing and branding and yet they are so incredibly close to. So if your perception is that it should be under something else . . well just pretend that it is!

Here we go –

Let’s take the same product, in the same place. On one of “The Apprentice” shows the challenge was to see which team could sell the most food at a football game. Both teams had exactly the same food, both teams were at the same game, both teams had the same number of members.

Team # 1 had hundreds of people crowded around the point where they were selling the food from. They had cheerleaders doing whatever it is that cheerleaders do, there were eating type competitions, lots of ra ra going on and lots of people everywhere. Sounds quite like fun doesn’t it. I am sure it was a lot of fun, but they did not win – Team # 2 did.

Team # 2 did not have a specific point where they sold the food from. There were no cheerleaders, there was no ra ra. So what happened? What made Team # 1 and Team # 2 so very different.

Well let’s examine the setting. Why do most people go to a football game? For me the most logical answer is ‘because they want to see the game’!

If you are going to the football game to watch the game, logic must tell you that you will not wanting to be queuing to buy food and drink irrespective of how gorgeous the cheerleaders are, or what the prize is for the eating competition. You’re there to watch the game and speaking from my own experience, I even resent having to queue up to go to the bathrooms.

So being logical again, it stands to reason that I would prefer it if someone came around to me with food and drink. It would mean that my focus was removed from the game (as I decided and ordered whatever it was that I wanted to eat and/or drink) for seconds rather than hours.

Here’s the other thing – people who get exactly what it is that they want, when they want it, don’t usually have a problem with paying more for it. Again, speaking from my own experience I would much rather pay say R30.00 for a steak roll that was delivered to me in my seat than say R15.00 for the same steak roll that I had to get up and go and find in another part of the stadium, where I had the irritation of having to queue for 15 to 20 minutes, have people pushing and shoving at me (we all know how that happens in a queue and it is one of my personal pet hates) and then when I eventually get back to my seat, I have missed most of the play and as luck would usually have it, the best goal/catch/run (insert whatever you want here). That would just annoy me immensely!

So what does that tell me? Simple really, “The key to success in business is GIVING PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT”.

Very simple, yet so many people get it all wrong!

So change your mindset – find out how to do things better, or faster, more profitable but most of all, find out what it is that people want and then give it to them in a better way, or much faster and then watch how your profits grow!

Nikki is an Internal Auditor and Business Administration Specialist who can be contacted on 083 702 8849 or nikki@viljoenconsulting.co.za or http://www.viljoenconsulting.co.za