Is Your Industry Veteran Status Jeopardizing Your Success?

By Sean Berg, Shift4 Payments

“I am a 30-year industry veteran.” This sentence is meant to instill confidence in the customer, but it may actually backfire. When you have decades of experience selling business technology you do have a tremendous amount of knowledge. But that knowledge can quickly become outdated as your customers’ needs and available technologies change. Choosing to be a lifelong learner in the industry is the way to continue to uncover customer needs and deliver valuable technology solutions.

Learning Your Customer's Needs

When you have serviced thousands of customers, it is easy to fall into the mindset of thinking you know what the business owner needs. As you prepare for the customer visit, are you having a dialogue in your mind you should be having with the customer? Are you predicting what the owner will need and whether or not your solution fits? If so, making assumptions about what a business owner needs— instead of asking — can go wrong in a number of ways, including...