3 Ways To Get The Customers You Want…Without Being Too Pushy

This blog post has been written in collaboration with Grace College’s Writing for Publication Class (Spring Semester 2020). Students were assigned topics to cover. Their blog posts were then assessed for publication by their professor and 1Eighty Digital. This blog post was written by Nicole Toth.

Sales representatives have gained a bad reputation of being overly aggressive when they’re trying to close more sales or attract new customers. For obvious reasons, this type of selling tactic doesn’t work because no one wants to be stuck in an uncomfortable conversation with an obnoxious person.

But that leaves us with the question of how to bring in more customers without coming across as “salesy” or too pushy?

Get To Know Your Customer

In order to sell your product or service to someone, you need to understand all you can about who your customer is.

Who is my customer? 

Know your customer’s demographic information. Figure out how your product or service can be helpful for those of different ages, occupations, education levels, and more. For example, trying to sell a brand-new sound system to a college student looks very different than trying to sell it to someone with a six-figure income.

What does my customer care about?

Discover your customer’s values, needs, hopes, and desires and how your product can satisfy those. Try not to make assumptions about potential customers. Instead, make an effort to get accurate information about your existing customer base that you can use to close more sales.

You can do your research through customer surveys, using existing customer data, and by reading customer reviews written about products similar to yours. 

Where does my customer live?

Knowing where your customer lives and how that affects the way they purchase your products and services is an important piece of information. Are they from a rural or urban area? Do they prefer to buy products in person from brick-and-mortar stores or by shopping online?

Using this information enables you to angle your sales pitch as friendly, relatable, and relevant to your customer’s needs. Many companies use information like this to create an avatar, also known as a “buyer persona”. This is a fictional person that displays the characteristics of your ideal customer and is used to help close more sales.

Want to get started creating buyer personas for your business? Hubspot has free resources that can help!

Ask Good Questions

Instead of jumping right to the part where you try to sell your product or service, take the time to ask a few questions to better understand each customer’s specific circumstances and needs. Ask Questions that center around the problem they’re trying to solve and what they’ve tried to use before to solve it.

Pro Tip: Using open-ended questions gives customers the opportunity to express their needs in a way that makes them feel comfortable.

Provide A Clear Solution

Keep in mind that your sales pitch is about what your customer needs, not about you. The entire purpose of selling your product or service is to provide the best solution for each customer.

People want to buy things for many reasons:

• To satisfy their needs
• To achieve their goals
• As a way to remove pain or obstacles

Providing a clear solution to your customer’s specific problem through your product or service makes them more willing to listen to your sales pitch.

After explaining your solution, be sure to give a clear, concise offer. At this point it is a mistake to give your potential customers an overwhelming amount of information about their possible next steps.

Keep it simple and close the sale in a firm yet friendly way. This gives your customer the relief of knowing you can be trusted to provide a solution for them.

Need help attracting more customers but don’t know where to start?