In Winning The Toughest Customer (The Essential Guide to Selling To Women), Delia Passi shares advice for improving your sales process to better serve all of your customers; both men and women. The author explains the need for a new level of selling, target selling, which she defines as selling to anyone and everyone the way they want to be sold to.
Although it didn’t occur to me at the time, I was lucky to have worked for (“with” actually is more accurate) women more than men early in my career. Tom Peters has been talking about women as a market force and the stupid ways that men treat them for several years. I remember when I first read some of his articles I thought “Duh! Who doesn’t know that?”. But then you read the stories that different women share about how they have been treated and it’s hard to believe the stupidity. And I’m not talking about the subtle things that Delia points out in her book like the environment or speaking styles, but just stupid, rude things like talking down to them or even ignoring them. So, in a way, I really enjoyed the book, but it’s too bad that it needed to be written.
Making the changes to your sales process the author recommends will not only help you sell better to women, you will sell better to everyone. This advice gets to the heart of selling; truly listening to the customer in order to determine what their real need is and then helping them fill that need. Contrast this to the typical reciting of features or “scripts” that we run into every day. It sounds oversimplified, but really listening seems to be a lost art these days. Value must be linked to the customers’ needs and wants, and the only way to do that is to listen in order to understand those needs and wants.
Another one of my favorite ideas from the book is “the customer should always get the floor”. Again, the importance of listening. Sounds like common sense, but how many times have you been interrupted by a sales person? And how often is what they interrupted you with relevant to what you were talking about?
Chapter 8, Putting It Into Play, outlines a 7 step process for selling to women. Here are the steps:
- The Encounter
- Gathering Information
- Seek to Understand
- Share Your Knowledge
- Fill the Need
- Coming to an Agreement
- The Commitment
Read this book and start selling more to women… and men.
