Developing buyer empathy can be good for business.

Developing Buyer Empathy Can Be Good for Business

Sales personnel who understand the environment of casting purchase decisions and the factors that influence buyer attitudes and performance can better plan their selling strategies. This also puts them in a good position to adopt more effective tactics during sales calls.

Although other purchasing influences, such as engineering or upper level management, are involved in casting marketing, buyers and purchasing managers have an important and usually decisive role in your sales success. Salespeople who demonstrate a considerable knowledge of the buyer's company and its particular purchasing dynamics and problems are perceived by the buyer to have more empathy. And this perception contributes a great deal to establishing a successful, long-term buyer/seller relationship.

Most casting salesmen obviously spend much of their productive selling time maintaining and building stronger relationships with buyers. Consequently, most good sales people have an opportunity to gather a great deal of information about a particular customer's company, its buyers and other important purchasing influences. Usually, obtaining and updating this information is done on an informal, almost casual basis in response to the buyer's personal characteristics and behavior.

Unfortunately, evidence seems to indicate that most sales and marketing people in our industry know little about the industrial purchasing environment, particularly as it relates to larger companies. They also do not seem to be very adept at receiving and interpreting clues about what may be really happening in many sales situations.

Diagnosing the Situation

For example, sales personnel do not attempt to understand the relationship between the buyer and his superior; the superior's leadership; levels of formalization in purchasing practices; performance evaluation of buyers; and the buyer's degree of dissatisfaction with his or her work. In particular, the sales personnel should be able to recognize buyers who are experiencing severe stress and try not to aggravate it by contributing to an already overloaded, tense environment.

Admittedly, it is difficult for most people in casting sales to diagnose a buyer's situation accurately. However, there are seminars and training programs that have been designed to help salespeople accomplish this. The National Association of Purchasing Managers, American Marketing Association and National Association of Manufacturers conduct seminars that concentrate on recognizing and coping with today's more complex purchasing dynamics.

They point out that the purchasing professional represents a strategic interface between you and your customer's company. Buyers operate at the boundary of their company under a great deal of uncertainty and stress related to prices, delivery schedules, casting availability and satisfying internal organizational objectives. They are under constant pressure from both production and top management to stabilize or reduce costs, carry minimum casting inventories, and at the same time, have adequate castings available so that production schedules are not interrupted.

Rules and Regulations

Most larger customers have very explicit rules and regulations about purchasing procedures, all of which decrease the flexibility and individual latitude the buyer can exert in making decisions. Also, most industrial buyers subscribe to a set of strict professional standards established by the NAPM. If your sales people are unfamiliar with these professional norms, their sales tactics may be in conflict with these established practices.

By all means, make sure your sales people are familiar with and understand the NAPM code of ethics. In addition, they should be aware of the educational process and background needed for a purchasing professional to attain certification. This will help your salespeople be customer experts as well as casting experts. Adapting to each customer's way of doing business is vital if you expect to develop full sales potential and build an effective long-term relationship.

Over the past 20 years, a profound change for the better has occurred in the role of corporate purchasing, and industrial buyers seem comfortable with their newly found status and power within the organizational hierarchy. However, years of being treated as second-class corporate citizens has created lingering protectionist tendencies that continue to characterize many buyers. Thus, your sales person's attempt to circumvent rules and procedures can cause distrust and quickly undermine a good relationship that may have taken years to establish. For example, going over a buyer's head to his boss is a sure way to invite trouble. So is putting the buyer on the spot with engineering or production people.

With the growing emphasis on more professional purchasing methods, it will pay to have your sales personnel acquire a better appreciation of the changing purchasing environment and its rules. They don't have to give the store away to get along well with the new breed of buyers. But they do have to develop a certain amount of empathy for the person who is frequently caught in the middle between his management and your foundry.