Principle 2: Uncover the customer’s needs through appropriate ‘probing’
Pool retailers and service companies can fall into the rut of being ‘order takers.’ This means they assume most customers know what they need and therefore only focus on meeting those needs. Worse yet, they assume they know how much a customer is willing or unwilling to pay for a product or service.
If everyone shopped on price alone, the ‘specialty retail’ category would not exist and most customers would maintain their pools themselves rather than hiring service companies. Customers value expertise and will pay for it.
Retailers who excel at value-based selling do not assume customers know how to solve their problems without help from an expert. Additionally, service companies do not presume customers know how to handle their pool problems themselves or that customers want to maintain their pools themselves until a problem hits. Appropriate probing involves asking the right questions to uncover the customer’s needs and wants, which then allows them to be addressed more effectively.
Open-ended questions are best at drawing out the customer’s true desires. For example, when a customer enters a specialty pool store to purchase chlorine tabs, the retailer may ask how the pool is looking this season, or how the customer is handling maintenance. The customer may be perfectly happy with the appearance of the pool, but he or she may be interested in an alternative to adding chlorine tabs every week.
This opens the door for the retailer to discuss other sanitizers that do not involve transporting, storing, handling and adding chlorine. Had the retailer simply assumed the customer was happy with the usual chlorine tabs, he or she would have missed an opportunity to sell the customer a premium product.
Meeting a customer for the first time provides another opportunity to ask open-ended questions. In this case, a service company might ask a customer the age of the pool’s finish and ECG, followed by how much longer the customer expects the pool finish and equipment to last.
This will open the door for discussing the benefits of a premium service program, which includes products designed to protect pool finishes and equipment, rather than just a basic program, which will keep the pool running during the short term but not over the long term.
Furthermore, a service company might also ask about bather load. For example, if the pool sees a high level of activity during the season, the pool owner might benefit from switching to a premium program that uses the highest grade salt and treatment products that better manage cloudy water and chlorine demand.
