10 Universal Truths You Must Remember to Boost Customer Sales 

Customers are overloaded and overwhelmed by too much information, so making any decision is a challenge. You may think this is only important to your marketing and salespeople, but in reality, it doesn’t matter how great your product or technology might be, you won’t succeed if you don’t understand your target customer’s decision process. Every aspect of your business must be about sales.

Everyone on your team needs a regular update on the latest insights for salespeople, like the classic book Heart and Sell, by sales training expert Shari Levitin.  Levitin outlines 10 universal truths about selling, and the customer decision process, which the author believe, and which every business needs to address in their product, business model, and their whole customer experience. Just think of your business as the sales engine, rather than making it just about the sales reps.

1. Success requires continuous learning and improvement. No matter how certain you are that your solution perfectly matches customer needs, you will be wrong. Success requires a willingness to take responsibility for shortcomings, and the ability to better understand needs and to quickly learn and adapt. This is the growth equation for every business.
2. Emotions drive customer decision-making. Your ability as a business to uncover and capitalize on customers’ emotional motivators will dictate your success. That’s why Steve Jobs spent as much time on “insanely great design” as technology and marketed to customer emotions.
3. Every growth business must have a repeatable process. Just as good salespeople have a repeatable process they follow, every new venture has to overcome the chaos of a new business, put structure in place, document its processes, and focus on scaling the engine. Everyone on the team must adopt the same culture and recipe for success.
4. Resilience is the life skill of a business. Setbacks are inevitable, but good businesses and good salespeople always bounce back. Both should assume that no never means never. A good business leader gets stronger as he or she learns from each growth failure, and responds ever more effectively to customer needs and expectations.
5. Business brand trust begins with customer empathy. Empathy is about being fully engaged with your customers, through interactive social media, and taking the time to listen to real customers face-to-face. You have to demonstrate common ground and shared values with your customers over the entire customer experience.
6. Integrity matters in all aspects of a business. Your business has to demonstrate integrity, reliability, and competency, just like a good sales team member. Integrity means doing what you say you’re going to do as a business, being responsive to changing needs, and making the right kind of promises to your target customer segment.
7. Grow by helping customers rather than pushing a message. If you ask customers how you can help, you will uncover what matters most. This is more effective in directing their thinking and actions than selling technology. Well-crafted questions pull in customers. Good questions create change. Great questions can change the world.
8. Emotional commitment precedes economic commitment. Don’t try to create a sense of urgency by appealing to greed. Your business and your team need to understand and demonstrate how your product connects precisely to what motivates your customers. These days, that includes a memorable total experience and testimonials from friends.
9. Removing customer resistance takes persistence. All customers are prone to raising objections, because change is hard, there are many competitors, and decisions take time to make. As a new business attempting to grow, you need to be able to isolate tough customer objections, and adapt your solution or business model to eliminate them.
10. Looking for wrongs never makes you right. Every business owner struggling with business growth has the urge to blame it on a lack of funding, an economic downturn, or an unfair competitor. Instead, look for what has worked, and what you haven’t yet tried with your customers, to get it right. Focus on the real purpose that customers seek.