There’s A Person on the Other End of that Number

Sales targets are a good thing. Challenging goals, coupled with rewards for meeting them, can be enormously powerful in motivating performance and driving results. But there is a downside: fixating too much on the numbers and thus forgetting the person on the other end of that number can backfire, leading to customer dissatisfaction and lower sales.

Don’t deemphasize the numbers, but counterbalance the focus on numbers with reminders of who benefits from what you sell. I’d like to propose making the customer—not as a “target”, or a “wallet”, but as a real, living, thinking and feeling person—a major focus of your sales efforts.

First, a few examples to illustrate the power of personalization:

·         One study showed that attaching a digital picture of the patient to a medical file increased the amount of time that radiologists spent looking at x-rays, and led to them spotting more unlooked-for issues.

·         Employees in a call center dedicated to soliciting donations from alumni for scholarship money were connected with students who had benefited from the scholarships, and heard about the difference the money had made in their lives. One month later, they had brought in an average of $506 per week as compared to $186, an increase of 172%.

·         When I worked in a bank, we had targets for cross-selling additional services to increase profitability. One product was credit life insurance, which was sold to people taking out car loans or consumer loans. The average was about 25% or less per loan made, except for one lady, Rosa, who consistently had almost 100% success. When we asked her why she was so successful, she told us that a close relative of hers had died, and his spouse ended up losing the car because she could not make the payments. Because she believed so strongly in the benefit, it made it easy for her to pass on that belief to customers.

·         Here’s a negative example: in wartime soldiers usually depersonalize the enemy by giving them  a nickname (often derogatory), which makes the idea of killing them a little less horrible.

What these examples point out is the importance of personalizing the outcomes that you sell. When you can connect your sales efforts to real results for real people, you will have a much stronger intrinsic reason to succeed than just to selfishly make a number. You will be guided by a sense of purpose which can be a much more powerful motivator than financial self-interest. Which achievement would you be more likely to brag about to your friends, making your number or making a difference in someone’s life?

We all know that testimonials from satisfied customers can be useful tool to convince customers, but if you are a sales manager, you might see even better results by using those testimonials for your own people.

When you start seeing your customers as a person and not a target, they will notice the difference. Trust requires more than just competence; they must also perceive that you have a genuine concern for their welfare. I call it the grandma rule: If that were your grandma sitting across the desk from you, what would you recommend to her?