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How to use Whole Brain® Thinking to communicate more effectively with your customers

by | Sep 2, 2019

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Customers. They’re the lifeblood of your business. Having good relationships with your customers is what drives your bottom line and helps you grow your business. Poor customer service, on the other hand, can cost your business big in lost customers and lost sales. 

The key to acquiring and retaining loyal customers lies not only in having valuable products and services, but also in how you communicate with them. 

What happens when you have a diverse customer base? Does the sale pitch go out the window?

Using Whole Brain® Thinking to bridge the divide between your staff and your customer

You’ve done the research. You know what your customers want. You’ve trained your staff. You’ve written the script. But still, it can feel like your staff and your customers are speaking different languages.

You might have created the perfect solution to your customers’ problems, but if there’s a fundamental disconnect between your staff and your customer, you simply won’t be able to communicate your solution to them. Whole Brain® Thinking can help you find a way to bridge that gap. 

Take, for example, a project with Telecom New Zealand, in which Herrmann was asked to help improve the business’s call centre performance. 

It was found that call centre staff at Telecom preferred analytical and practical styles of thinking. Customers, on the other hand, tended to prefer relational and experimental styles. There was an underlying disconnect between staff and customer, which meant the two parties simply couldn’t communicate. 

The solution was Whole Brain® Thinking-based training. Whole Brain® Thinking empowered staff members to recognise the communication preferences of their customers and adapt their communication styles accordingly. With these new communication skills, staff were able to better understand and address the rational and emotional needs of their customers. 

That’s the power of Whole Brain® Thinking. Where once it felt like staff and customers were speaking different languages, the Whole Brain® Thinking methodology gave employees the tools and skills to better understand, connect and engage with their customers. 

How to apply Whole Brain® Thinking to the sales process to achieve higher sales performance

Customers of today have higher expectations than ever before. They also have more options. They want solutions that can fix complex problems. And if they’re not satisfied you can meet that challenge, they know there are other businesses that can. What customers want is a business that can provide value to improve their lives. They don’t want a sales pitch. 

What this means is that salespeople need to be able to connect with customers quickly and gain a true understanding of what’s most important to them in order to better address their needs. 

Salespeople know they need to adjust their sales approach based on the situation at hand. But what they might not know is that the buying and selling process is underpinned by our thinking preferences. Pivots in sales strategy can’t be superficial or based on a script. It’s not just about explaining product features. Salespeople need to be able to quickly understand what’s important to their customers, how they prefer to communicate and how to adapt their own communication style to those preferences.

With a diverse customer base and constantly changing customer requirements, salespeople need to have the thinking agility to adapt their communication styles quickly. Becoming an agile thinker involves training your brain to leverage all the thinking styles available to you. You might be a Relational thinker, but being an agile thinker means you can easily switch to an Analytical thinking and communicating style if the customer situation or problem requires it. 

The difference between a Whole Brain® approach to sales training and behavioural approaches is that Whole Brain® Thinking takes into account a critical aspect of decision-making: thinking. It recognises that buying decisions are heavily influenced by how we think and what information we need to make a purchase. With a Whole Brain® approach to selling, a salesperson is able to better understand what information a customer needs to make a decision, how to best present that information, and how they need to adapt their communication style to influence the customer’s perception. 

Download our Achieving Higher Sales Performance whitepaper to learn more about improving your sales revenue.

How to use Whole Brain® Thinking to better communicate with your customers

If you’re looking to up your team’s customer service capabilities, Whole Brain® Thinking could be the solution. Mastering Whole Brain® Thinking will give your customer service staff the skills and techniques they need to better understand, connect and engage with your customers, no matter how diverse your customer base. 

Enquire about our ThinkAbout™ Your Customer Workshop. Your team will learn how to use Whole Brain® Thinking to understand, plan for, and adapt to a customer’s thinking preference to better meet their underlying needs. 

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