Winning the Toughest Customer

Free Book Summary : Winning the Toughest Customer The Essential Guide to Selling to Women By Delia Passi with A.B. Aronson Kaplan Publishing, 2006 ISBN 978-1-4195-3554-3 155 pages

The Big Idea
Many sales professionals find it a daily struggle to understand women customers. The way women interpret behavior, hear unexpected meanings, take in “peripheral” information, and view the overall sales process is very different from how men do so. Needless to say, selling to women is very tough and can often make or break one’s sales career.

As a result, women’s wants, expectations, and needs are far too often misunderstood and/or are not met at the sales professional’s peril. The female market is the largest consumer market out there, and sales professionals can afford neither to ignore nor belittle it.

The New Playing Field: Today’s Women’s Market
Selling is a communication process. Communication means the transmission of ideas or information. With women, though, the communication process becomes quite a bit more complex than just making a pitch or gathering information.

Among other things, women need more input, take longer to decide, require more follow-up, and expect more attentive service than men.

It’s important to note that when selling to women, you can’t just “add pink and stir.” You have to adapt your marketing, selling and negotiating skills to suit differing values, priorities and preferences!

Getting It, Part I: Understanding Gender Talk
Women like to use more words than men do. They like telling stories, leaving longer messages, and explaining things in greater detail. Men can come across as being too aggressive, pushy, impatient and overbearing to women; and women as too emotional, too tentative, and too uncertain to men.

Men talk to make a point, to solve problems themselves, to compete and to achieve; take-charge, decision-making talk. Women, on the other hand, talk to collaborate, to get others’ inputs when solving problems, to connect, to share; it’s about feelings, context, needs; it’s more personal, less decisive and uses more nonverbal cues.These characteristics are changing now that the “traditional” boundaries that separate the sexes are becoming blurred - more and more women are becoming more decisive, and more men are becoming more participative.

To learn to talk to a woman, men need to learn to code switch. This means changing your speech style to suit the customer you’re talking to.

Getting It, Part II: Listening Techniques That Get Through
Learn to listen to them.

• Think feelings.
• Think relationships.
• Think context.
• Show her you’re listening and are on ‘her team’
• Avoid talking down to her

Taking The Field: Ten Steps To Building The Relationship
Here’s a simple ten-point program to connect with women consumers:

1. Welcome them with handshakes and smiles.
2. Give her your card.
3. Create the right environment.
4. Make eye contact.
5. Let her take the lead.
6. Listen attentively.
7. Listen attentively some more!
8. Ask the right questions.
9. Empower her.
10. Go for her comfort zone.

Get On Her Team: Positioning That Works
Women see the setting as integral, not peripheral, and are always adding information.The setting for your sales pitches needs to show her that you are smart, knowledgeable, helpful, considerate, understanding, reliable and trustworthy.

Rethinking Victory: How You Close A Woman
In the end it really is all about the buy. Everyone in the business is looking for the right formula to close the sale. Women customers can be particularly frustrating in this regard, as has already been discussed.

Don’t use high-pressure tactics to close women. These work with men, but they may even drive women away as they are particularly sensitive to feeling pushed or threatened, most especially by men. Low-pressure sales approaches would work better.

Women are always very concerned with value as opposed to simple price incentives. Value must be linked to her needs and wants, not yours or anybody else’s. You have to show her how much the product or service offers for her own specific needs.

Winning For Keeps: The Added Value Of Brand-Loyal Women
You could stop after a successful sale, but you’d be cheating yourself out of even better days ahead if you do. A satisfied female customer is very likely to come back with repeat business. Women are, after all, twice as likely as male customers to make referrals. So you’ll need to continue the relationship beyond the close.

Putting It Into Play: Notes Before You Go
To recap and end, here’s a quick list of each stage of the sales process, along with a checklist of things to remember per stage.

1. The initial encounter. Your goal is to start off winning, to make her comfortable and establish rapport.
2. Gather information. Your goal is to capture the information necessary to position your product in her terms.
3. Seek to understand. Your goal is to demonstrate to her that she was heard and understood.
4. Share your knowledge. Your goal is to empower her with insight and information.
5. Fill the need. Your goal is to position your product or service as a solution to her need.
6. Come to an agreement. Your goal is to make her feel good about this commitment.
7. Establish a commitment. Your goal is to get her to trust the relationship.