Because of the crowding in today’s markets and confusion among buyers, they are now prone to view apparently similar products or services as similar. The key to success in a crowded market is to find what buyers value most, then point out the unique advantages of your product or service. When you focus on what the customer values most, you create perceived value that makes your product stand out from the crowd and leads to a buying decision.

Don’t Outnumber Your Customers

Think of where to direct your focus in this way: of the four areas where you can focus—self, company, product or customer—if you focus on the first three, your customer is out-numbered three to one. People who are overwhelmingly out-numbered feel confused and uncomfortable. People who are confused and uncomfortable rarely make buying decisions.

Most sales organizations have rallied their troops against their number one adversary: their customers! The reasoning has been that if the sales force is trained to maximize their personal gains, the outdated concept of a sales "pitch" demonstrates a hot new product, and if the organization makes bold claims about itself, then the customer will fall like prey to a hunter.

Customer Focus or Die!

The least effective are those who are focused on their survival. These people worry that if they do not make a sale today, their electricity may be turned off tomorrow. The paradox is that no one wants to buy from someone who is desperate, particularly in the face of an abundance of other options. Customers themselves cannot survive by acting as a welfare agency to hard-pressed salespeople.

Self oriented salespeople in this group focus on quota. To them, it does not matter what the customer wants or needs, but only that they "meet quota" on Product X. Quota focusers often achieve the minimum to get by, nothing more, nothing less. They have no emotional commitment to their job, they are just doing as they are told. In a crowded, competitive niche, the salespeople in this category are going to lose their customers to those who go beyond the minimum.

Among the bottom feeders are salespeople who simply push products. Often these salespeople have been hyped up with a sales contest. We believe strongly that, at best, sales contests can only lead to short-range victories and may have seriously detrimental effects on long-range success.

You can identify product-driven salespeople by their well-practiced and smoothly delivered "sales pitch." They have been trained that if they deliver their presentation with consistency, someone eventually will buy.

Other "also rans" focus on their organization. You may hear them brag about their company, saying "we’re the biggest in the industry," as if that alone will make customers buy. From Hertz and Avis, to CBS and CNN, every industry is replete companies who believed that sheer size and industry position in themselves would guarantee market share.

If your standard presentation is always focused on your company’s size or reputation, what will you sell if a competitor outgrows you, or if a flurry of bad news should tarnish your company’s reputation?

The only sales organizations and sales reps that will prosper throughout the 21^st Century will be those who focus on their customers’ needs and wants. And, even the top performers have a hierarchy of their own. Within that group, we discovered that those in the top five percent accounted for 60 percent of sales. The remainder of the group—15 percent, accounted for only 20 percent of sales. While that is as much as the entire bottom 80 percent, it is still only a fraction of the per person results enjoyed by the top five percent.

This remarkable finding prompted us to dig further to identify the cause of such disparity in sales effectiveness. Here is what we found: