Customers Come in Three Flavors

The three types of customers will not surprise you; their classifications are almost self-explanatory. Whether a customer is positive, neutral, or negative influences his or her willingness to share specifics of goals and filters.

Positive Customers

They are your long-term and loyal customers with whom you practice relationship selling. As long as positive customers cannot measure value, they always choose their trusted and existing supplier—you. Therefore, competitors who rely on products with perceived value have an uphill battle to make positive customers switch to them. When they do not compete on measurable value, they face an undesirable prospect. Competitors either buy sales by offering the lowest prices or are fortunate enough to meet crucial delivery dates. Understandably, competitors usually do not want to bother with your positive customers; they figure there must be easier sales opportunities out there (more on this shortly).

Note

With positive customers, the cost of change can become a more formidable barrier to competitors if you attach measurable dollar amounts to these costs.

Your strongest support from positive customers occurs when your unique strengths achieve their goals and produce measurable benefits. Therefore, ensure that they know how your company helps them to achieve their goals measurably better than anyone else does. Again, measurable value builds barriers to competition and ensures that you exceed customers' expectations. Remember, "Competitors do not win over your customers, you unwillingly lose them due to unfulfilled expectations.''

Note

A good indicator of whether your customers fit the positive category is their willingness to write reference letters. These endorsements highlight the goals—and measurable benefits—you help them achieve. Use them with other potential customers in the same market segments. Provide them a sample reference letter to save them time and effort. In addition, nothing is worse than reference letters with grammatical and spelling errors, typos, and a failure to point out your unique strengths or documented savings. Treat hesitant reference letter writers as caution signs. They might not yet qualify as positive customers.

Neutral Customers

As their name implies, these customers do not prefer a specific company's products and services. They are fair game for every salesperson, so they provide the largest number of sales opportunities. Yet, they are a neglected group because they have the most unknowns, such as how they select suppliers other than on a seemingly random basis. When you deal with unknowns, selling efforts increase although your prospects for success might not.

You usually wait for neutral customers to contact you first. At least you know they are serious about buying something—maybe even from you. You use the courtship selling mode with them. Your objective is to move them to the positive category or at least stop them from sliding into the negative category. If you can show them how the measurable value of your unique strengths matches up to their goals, you will achieve your objective. Competitors are planning to do the same thing, but they do not consciously think in terms of measurable value; you do. Thus, they do not stand a chance in the battle for the neutrals.

Negative Customers

They are long-term and loyal customers—of competitors. You use brinkmanship selling with them. With them, you always lose the battle of perceived value. They select competitors' products with perceived value over your products with perceived value every time (so that is why you lost that last sale). Therefore, without measurable value, you have an uphill battle (lowest prices or meeting crucial deliveries) to make negative customers choose your products. Otherwise, wait for competitors to lose them. The "create-and-wait'' strategy described later in this chapter helps you in this endeavor.

Now, let us examine the details of the nine filters.