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October 10, 2014 at 12:00 AM
You’re not a customer-service representative, you’re a salesperson. And it’s not the job of a salesperson to tell a customer that he’s right. When you call a company for support, on the other hand, you expect the customer-service rep to help you get the outcome you need.
But if you’re a salesperson, acting like a customer-service rep will make you weak and ineffective (or what we would call an “order-taker”). Your relationship with your client is different. It confers greater responsibility, and this often means you have to tell your client that she’s wrong or that she can’t have what she wants the way that she wants it.
Dear client, you are wrong. If you’re a salesperson, you want to be consultative. You want to achieve “trusted advisor” status. You want to create the highest level of value, which means you’re setting the bar very high for yourself.
Your client doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what other companies are doing. He doesn’t know what you’re doing for your other clients. Most of the time, he doesn’t know all the options for producing better results. And a big part of the reason he doesn’t know is because he doesn’t know that he should be dissatisfied.
You have to tell your client that what he believes is not true, when that is the case. You have to tell him the truth about how he can produce better results. And you have to tell him how he can do better, which brings us to the second part of your responsibility.
