The essence of any successful guided selling strategy is the ability to fully understand customers’ needs and recommend the best possible combination of products and services to meet them. For a guided selling to be believable it has to be trusted – even for commodity products.
The good news is that social networking’s many applications have the data necessary for making guided selling highly effective. To the left is Brian Solis’ Conversation Prism. This is one the most widely referenced graphical models of social networking because it illustrates simply and powerfully how ongoing feedback and insight drives participation. Look at the inner three circles of the prism as well, and all contribute to the brand’s position.
Social Networking Has Much Potential for Guided Selling
The catalyst that makes this entire model “move” is trust. I am currently reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith and I highly recommend it.
As I’ve read through the first chapters of the book so far it dawned on me that Trust Agents are a lot like the best guided selling systems you can possibly design. They redefine their area of an industry (what the authors call “Make Your Own Game”) and they also have many of the same attributes the authors discuss. You’ll have to pick up the book to see the further connections to guided selling and product configuration systems that gain trust and therefore excel in serving customers.
Trust Is Earned When Customers Get Respect
- The best guided selling systems pick up on the nuances of needs and wants customers have and model the application quickly to those preferences. As a result, they are not forced choice Myers-Briggs exercises in navigating a product catalog. They are experiences being built in real-time. Go check out a social networking app and you can get a sense of this usability aspect. From Facebook to Twitter to any number of other apps that have advanced usability, it’s all about streamlining the experience first to make the sales possible.
- Guided selling systems need to be evangelists of product value and exceptional experience. Evangelists seek to understand the innate desires, needs, wants and passions of an audience, whether that evangelist is selling the Apple iTouch as a development platform or Microsoft selling their .NET vision. They get in touch with the passions people have and give them a path to their goals – they enable a vision to be attained. The best guided selling systems does this – and if you doubt this just go onto Expedia and start thinking about a trip to Tahiti (or your favorite warm destination) and you will find amazing ways to rationalize those airfares. Guided selling systems could learn much more from social networking apps and technologies of how to be even better evangelists. Again this gets back to earning trust and setting expectations – and then exceeding them.
- Delighting customers by having more knowledge of them and their expectations by mining social networks shows exceptional potential. Imagine being on a business trip and staying at a hotel chain you haven’t been to in months. When you check in they remember you are a member of their loyalty club, and they have the request you did five years ago saying you like fresh fruit in your room when you arrive and that you like a ground floor room because you like to get out and run in the mornings and don’t like hassling with elevator lines. Because you’re a Facebook fan of the hotel chain they give you a discount coupon promises through Twitter and Facebook. You didn’t have to ask, they just did it. You see what guided selling could be? Like a virtual 24/7 concierge. I have a friend who manages one of the largest Hilton hotels in the Los Angeles area and the biggest training challenge is to get employees to deliver what he calls “service with heart”. How much better to give the employees a chance to know customers before they arrive – anticipating their needs and delivering service with heart? Guided selling with social networks could make this happen.
Bottom line: Earning trust by thoroughly understands customers’ expectations and then exceeding them is what best practices in guided selling can be. It is far beyond automating commodity transactions – it can be a catalyst for delivering service with heart.
Courtesy – Louis Columbus
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