Pillar Two: Meet Your Customer's Purchasing Needs

By Julian Ignatowski, Sr.


Knowing how to meet your customer's purchasing needs is just one of those unspoken rules in servicing the customer which is often overlooked.  This occurs primarily because you honestly don't know what your customer's purchasing needs are, or you outright failed to listen to the customer.  And, the only reason why you wouldn't know your customer's purchasing needs is because you haven't been interested enough in finding out exactly what they are.  That's right, here's another Pillar that will involve you asking the pertinent questions of your customer.  When you don't take the valuable time to figure out exactly what your customer's purchasing needs are and you try to service the customer regardless, you may find yourself slightly embarrassed in the least and only end up making a total jackass of yourself.  Furthermore, your customer will end up feeling anything within a spectrum from being slightly annoyed to that of feeling completely frustrated with you.  It is this type of reaction(s) from the customer that could end up leading to bad press for you.  Plus, such a debacle could result in the possibility of a potential loss of future business from the customer that now feels so irrelevant.

Let's put this into practice to make my point come into view.  Let's say it's my mom's birthday and I ask her what she wants.  Well, her response indicates she'd be delighted to own some new music.  Because I know my mom's purchasing needs, if she mentions music, it's either going to be gospel, Motown or country.  Anything outside those genres and I'm in trouble; she will hate the gift and hand it back to me to return and get her what she wants.  If I purchase a Jay-Z or Lil John CD, my mom will probably meet with her attorney and have me written out of her will.

I'm reminded of another example.  A couple weeks back, our family was out grocery shopping and this lovely senior citizen woman was working this coffee stand and promoting a new coffee creamer product.   She beckoned us over to her modest stand that boasted a coffee maker, samples of the product she was trying to promote, a stack of napkins and a sleeve of sample-sized styrofoam cups.  She said hello and asked my wife and me if we were coffee drinkers.  We told her that it was one of those commodities that every home enjoys.  So, she started to go into her spiel about the product -- a caramel chocolate syrup to flavor your coffee (which sounded delightful).  Unfortunately, it sounded better than it tasted.  The thing is our family is "anti-high fructose corn syrup".  And, guess what, the primary ingredient was just that.  We didn't want to break her heart, especially seeing that she "broke the rules by giving us three coupons for the product when she's only allowed to give out one per customer".  But, the sweet lady didn't know our purchasing needs.  We weren't there for coffee to begin with, we don't normally flavor our coffee and finally, we avoid all artificial sweeteners.  Had she asked us some more qualifying questions, she would have been able to determine whether or not we'd close the deal and actually grab the product in the freezer section and carry it out the store with us.  But, that was not the case.  We brought the three coupons to the place where the syrups were located and left them for the next buyer.

Take a look at the following clip of the movie, "Must Love Dogs" starring Diane Lane and John Cusack.  I want you to especially pay attention to the first 25 seconds of the actual movie clip.  Please note that there may be an advertisement that prefaces this clip (if it doesn't open up by clicking on the link, you may need to cut and paste it to your web browser):

http://www.fandango.com/movie-trailer/mustlovedogs-trailer/87870

I think Diane Lane's character "Sarah" pretty much sums it up on how many of us feel when those who are supposed to be "taking care of us as customers" are just too plain busy going through the motions "serving us" to stop and really ask us what our purchasing needs as a precursor to actually servicing us.  If I live alone, why would I need to be sold on a year's supply of toilet paper?  If I'm a vegan, why would you offer me barbecue spare ribs?  If I'm allergic to latex, why are you handling me with latex gloves in your medical office? It's because you haven't asked the right questions. As your customer, you should care enough about our relationship to be willing to qualify my purchasing needs before you attempt to meet those needs.  Otherwise, you're just wasting everyone's time guessing.