Understanding the Buyer

Who is your ideal customer and why would they buy from you?

Language providers often take an inside out approach to selling, focussing on promoting translation services or language technology, rather than putting themselves in the shoes of the buyer and understanding their needs.

Salespeople are always being taught how to sell, but this is the least powerful way of completing a transaction. Salespeople learn techniques, like closing and systems of selling, but none of them are more powerful than someone wanting to buy. In fact, all of them are useless if someone doesn’t want to buy or doesn’t like the person he or she is buying from.

Don’t waste time and money on courses to learn how to sell! You should be focusing on buyers and understanding why people buy. You can argue that relationship building, questioning skills, networking, and presentation skills are all part of the “selling process,” but buying motives are a million times more powerful than selling skills.

Think of your buying motives in your personal life. Why do you buy? You decide that you need or want something. Then you justify the need or the want, and you literally search for it. Someone may steer you in a different direction, or you may make a compromise, but whatever “it” is, you’re going to do whatever you can to own one. That need is defined as an emotion, and it has nothing to do with logic. Emotion is a primary motive for buying, and in the emotional state, people will pay to get what they want.

Have you identified what moves your customer to a purchase your localization service over the competition's?

People do not like being sold to, but they do like to invest in a solution that adds value to their work. Knowing your buyer and aligning your offering to add value to their work, is a key element of a successful relationship.

This starts by understanding the target markets that the commercial team are focussing on, then understanding trends, regulation, opportunities, and threats impacting that industry.

When mapping your targets, you should be mapping both the buyer centres (Legal, Marketing, HR etc), and the buyer personas (Legal Associate, Head of Digital etc).

We then need to build a message and a story to resonate with their needs and priorities, for example, CFO (cost saving), CMO (media, creative content), COO (risk and process efficiency).

Once you have mapped out these targets, built out the message on the value proposition, you are ready to deliver the story to prospects. This is the starting point for developing your commercial teams into a consultative sales approach.