How to Use Your Customers' Questions to Increase Your Sales
The Profitable Art of Listening to Your Customers
Questions. You get them from potential customers all the time. And often you get the same questions again and again and again. Wouldn't you love to be done with all those repetitive questions - and at the same time increase your sales?
You can do both by using one simple technique:
Just listen to what they say.
Customer questions are like gold. Big companies pay big money to bring in focus groups to ask their opinions on products. Granted, you don't have the same control over what information your questioners tell you that the big companies have over their focus groups, but you can get lots of useful information nonetheless.
Finding out what they don't understand
When you get the same questions over and over, chances are your visitors couldn't find the answer on your site or auction. So, once you identify a question as one that people ask frequently, find ways to answer it online.
A couple of years ago, I studied the questions a client's callers asked in emails and on the phone and wrote some stock answers that he could cut and paste into email responses to those questions. I also integrated those answers into the pages of the website.
He never had to use those cut-and-paste responses. Visitors get their questions answered right on the site and are able to move forward with their purchase decision without calling or emailing those questions.
Finding out the way they think
You can also connect to your customers better (and increase the likelihood of them buying) by listening to the words they use to talk about your products.
When I designed that same client's site, he and I always referred to the graphics on his site as images or artworks. And the sales copy I wrote used those terms. But as we looked at how potential customers referred to the artworks that made up his products, we found that potential customers referred to them usually as designs, sometimes as artworks, and never as images.
That led us to go through the whole site and change the terminology to reflect the way potential customers thought of his products.
An example
Not important? Consider this. A businessman went to a dinner party one time, hoping to introduce himself to a potentially important client whom he had been trying to meet for months.
At the party, he and a companion found an opportunity to strike up a conversation with the potential client. In their small talk, the businessman found that the two of them shared a love of skiing.
'Where do you go to ski?' the businessman asked.
The potential client replied enthusiastically, 'We have a nice little chalet up in Aspen.'
Sensing an opportunity for bonding, the businessman pressed on. 'How often do you go to your little cabin?'
The potential client's enthusiasm cooled considerably. 'We make it up to our chalet twice a month during the season,' he said.
Not catching the other's change in tone, the businessman continued, 'My family had a little cabin, too, when I was little. I always loved going up there.'
But the conversation spiraled downward until the potential client finally excused himself to talk with another guest.
The businessman couldn't understand what went wrong until his companion suggested, 'He was so proud of his chalet, but you kept calling it a cabin.'
'What's wrong with that?' the businessman replied. 'I have a lot of affectionate feelings for that cabin.'
'But his affectionate feelings are for something he saw as a chalet,' the companion pointed out.
Reflecting the words your potential customers use in thinking about the products you offer them strengthens their feeling that you understand their needs. Using other words suggests to them that you don't.
Final thoughts
Listen to the words they use. And especially listen to their questions. Working their words and the answers to the questions they haven't even had a chance to ask into your sales copy is a powerful way to win their trust - and their sales.
Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.
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