Instill Customers’ Confidence in You and Your Products
At the most high-profile speaking engagement of my career, I had the kind of confidence crisis most male speakers never have to worry about. I was in Las Vegas, and an hour before my presentation, I was led backstage to meet a makeup artist who’d been assigned to make all the speakers look fabulous for their big moment onstage. As I sat in a chair, the artist began applying makeup, and I quickly realized there was no mirror for me to watch what was happening: we were in a windowless room with bare walls. I sat for forty-five minutes while she put on what felt like thousands of products.
Normally, I don’t wear much makeup, and I became increasingly uncomfortable as my presentation time drew nearer. What is she doing to me? I thought.
When she finally finished, I stood up and walked over to a mirror on the other side of the room for the “reveal.” I didn’t recognize myself. There was more makeup on my face than I’d ever worn in my life. Bright red lipstick, thick black eyeliner . . . the look screamed “Las Vegas showgirl” instead of “competent business executive.” The next ten minutes were spent in a panic as I asked the makeup artist to scrape everything off my face before I walked onstage. I was rattled by the experience. Instead of bolstering my confidence, the makeover had shaken it. I thought to myself, I bet this never happens at Sephora.
Why did Sephora come to mind in that moment? Because feeling confident with beauty products is something I associate with that brand. I’m not alone. Owned by French luxury group LVMH, Sephora has more than twenty-five hundred stores in thirty-four countries and is the number one specialty beauty retailer in the world.1 It got there by building customer confidence in both the products it sells and the experience it delivers.
BEST PRACTICE
Sephora
Confidence Is Beautiful
The entire beauty industry is built on selling confidence. My nightmare makeover in Las Vegas could have been someone else’s dream look, but it sure wasn’t mine. How does any retailer drive customer confidence in an industry that’s so wildly subjective? Sephora has the key, and its innovative strategies provide valuable insights for any brand. Because no matter what product or service you represent, confidence closes sales.
Sephora sales associates—the company calls them beauty advisors—help customers feel confident about their product choices through a blend of technology and “analog” customer experiences. “Our stores are a stage, and our beauty advisors provide performance and real interaction with our clients, not just transactions,” says Mary Beth Laughton, Sephora executive vice president of omni retail for the US market. “We use technology to complement the beauty advisors’ expertise . . . and to make them even more powerful.”
Sephora stores carry more than two hundred brands, and beauty advisors must cater to the full spectrum of customer needs, from self-service product replenishment (“I’m out of my favorite lipstick and need a new one”) to beauty transformations (“I’m ready for a whole new look”) to playful experimentation (“I want to try one of those glowing highlighters”). They do it using tools the company has built to help with different customer paths. These tools help beauty advisors curate the brand’s vast number of products in a way that makes customers feel more certain they’re buying the right ones for their needs.
Every industry has customer pain points, and in beauty, one issue rises above the rest: finding products that perfectly match someone’s skin tone. This is especially difficult with foundation, the product serving as the makeup “base,” which is applied to the face before anything else. The number of choices is overwhelming: Sephora alone offers more than 130 different foundation collections and 3,000 different shades. Women can tell you that it’s easy to buy the wrong shade of foundation because it might look great under a store’s fluorescent lights, but terrible under different lighting. To solve this pain point and help customers feel confident about their choice, Sephora partnered with Pantone, the company best known for its color-matching system, to create a tool called Color iQ.
Here’s how it works: a Sephora beauty advisor holds up a handheld device, about the size of a phone, to a customer’s face, capturing several different images of her skin. Once the images are captured, the digital tool assigns the customer a Color iQ number. Armed with her personalized Color iQ number, the customer can identify all the products that will match her skin tone across every brand Sephora carries. The technology has taken the concept of product curation to a whole new level and has been expanded to include additional product categories such as skincare and even fragrance.
Another area of the business that’s designed to drive customer confidence is the beauty makeover, a staple of the industry. Nobody wants a customer to walk away unhappy from a makeover, as I did in Las Vegas, because if she doesn’t feel great about the way she looks, there’s little chance she’ll buy the products that were used on her. To increase customers’ confidence, Sephora created an augmented reality tool called Sephora Virtual Artist, which lets customers see photos of themselves “wearing” different makeup looks and products. Beauty advisors use this tool to allow customers to choose their favorite look before the makeover begins. “It helps Beauty Advisors talk to clients about what they’re aiming for in advance,” says Laughton. “There’s this meeting of the minds . . . and it increases the client’s confidence.” This tool is also available directly to consumers through the Sephora website and app, allowing people to “try on” different looks and makeup colors at home, with augmented reality.
Sephora also has transformed the classic makeover experience into an opportunity to collect customer data. Beauty advisors scan information on the products applied during a makeover, and at the end of the session they send that information to the customer so she can buy the products and replicate the look.
In this way and many others, Sephora is using technology to drive customer confidence in what was once the most analog of businesses. The company operates an innovation lab in San Francisco and is constantly testing new strategies. When I ask Laughton about what lies ahead for the company’s digital strategy, she tells me there is no digital strategy: there is only a customer strategy.
“We start with the customer need,” says Laughton. “We don’t start with technology. We’ll look at the need and ask, is there a role that technology or innovation can play to address this? For example, we don’t have an AI [artificial intelligence] strategy. We have experiences that we’re designing to meet consumer needs that may happen to use AI technology. That’s the way we’ve got to think about it. We’re really careful that we’re not adding technology for the sake of introducing something new and shiny.”
MASTERING THE FUNDAMENTALS OF CUSTOMER CONFIDENCE
You don’t have to be a Sephora-size business to make your customers feel confident in their interactions with you. Like everything else in sales, there is no one silver bullet. What follows are some fundamental techniques for driving customer confidence. Most don’t cost a thing.
Curate a manageable number of options.
Too much choice can be paralyzing and grind decision-making to a halt. If you’ve asked the right questions or have the right technology (like Sephora Color iQ), you should be able to narrow down your customers’ product choices to a short list of recommendations. Curation is necessary to help drive customers toward buying decisions, and this is a prime way to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise.
Don’t do all the talking.
Build pauses into your conversations to give customers “airtime” to surface questions or concerns. Engage your customers with check-in questions throughout your conversations to make sure you’re maintaining their attention. The more questions you ask, the more opportunities you have to provide great answers and build customers’ confidence. On phone calls, where you have no visual cues, checking in with your customers is even more important. Ask questions such as
• “How does this sound so far?”
• “Does this meet your expectations?”
• “Do you have any questions I haven’t addressed?”
Also, give your customers audible assurance that you’re listening. This may not come naturally to everyone. Culturally, it’s women who are expected to encourage speakers in conversation through actions such as head nods, “Mm-hmms,” or reactive expressions, such as “That’s interesting to hear.” When working with women as customers, it’s important for both male and female sales professionals to exhibit listening behaviors, whether in person or on the phone. Sometimes this can be as simple as repeating what your customer has said and demonstrating that you’ve understood her; for example, “I hear you loud and clear—we will not include delivery in our quote.”
Follow up quickly.
One of the top issues I hear from women is that sales professionals do not follow up, which is ironic when you consider that we’ve never had more ways to communicate with customers. Lack of follow-up is so pervasive that sometimes you can win a sale just by being the first—or only—person who follows up with a customer in a timely fashion. This means there are huge opportunities for people who are proactive, especially in industries with long sales cycles, where it may take ten or more interactions before a customer commits to buy. Follow-up builds trust, and trust builds sales.
Understand how women define value.
You now know that for women, value doesn’t necessarily mean the lowest price: it often means what I bought is worth more than I paid for it. Therefore, it’s a good idea to underscore factors such as long-term value or resale value. Will your product last twenty years? Does it have a warranty? Will it add value to your customers’ homes? Will it help them attract more talent to their business? Does it have versatility—can it be used to accomplish more than one thing? In both B2B settings and consumer sales, “making the business case” is especially important with women, who often represent a broad range of other people when making buying decisions. As such, they often find themselves not only factoring in other people’s opinions but also explaining their decisions to others. Helping your customers recognize the value behind what you’re selling—and not just the price—is one of the most important confidence builders there is.
Provide key questions for customers to ask themselves.
One idea for setting yourself apart from competitors is to create a list of questions that customers should ask themselves before buying a product or service in your industry. These questions could be part of your sales collateral or marketing materials. Ideally, they will showcase your capabilities and frame your business as the right answer for someone’s needs, because you will be able to answer yes to all of them. Here are some sample questions for an imaginary B2B company. Try to come up with five to ten for your own business.
1. Does the firm have global capabilities to help you enter new markets?
2. Does the firm offer quarterly updates to keep you apprised of progress?
3. Does the firm offer you educational resources and tools?
You see the pattern here—you are setting up your firm as the natural, smart choice.
Remember that for women, the little things are the big things.
As we’ve seen throughout this book, details are credibility indicators for women buyers. One of the best strategies for instilling confidence is to focus on getting the details right. As previously mentioned, when you get the “small” things right, women are confident that you can be trusted with the big things—like their business. Here are some credibility indicators women may notice in your work:
• Proper spelling and grammar in your communications
• Correct name spelling
• Punctuality
• Following up when you say you will
• Cleanliness at retailers and offices
• A professional online presence
Give your customer a “win.”
Everyone’s looking for a win, that little bit extra that makes someone feel that he or she has been given something above and beyond the purchase price. Giving your customer a “win” is especially important when you can’t move on price. Here’s a simple example: I was in the market for a new bicycle, and after I tested a new cruiser at a local shop, the store owner said, “If you buy this bike, I’ll give you an ergonomic women’s bike seat at no cost.” He then handed me the bike seat for inspection. Logically, I knew the bike seat cost him little. In fact, it’s likely he had already built the seat cost into the bike’s price. However, in that moment, it felt like a win. This strategy can be motivating for your customer. “Wins” are also the kinds of things that women will mention to their friends and other networks. Plan them for talk value.
Highlight all the value you personally bring to the table.
If you’re in a service business, your customers probably don’t realize all the things you do behind the scenes to add value to the product or service they’re buying. How could they? Here’s a great exercise for a slow day: write down all the things you do for customers that they may never see. Document this list, and when it’s appropriate, bring up or show someone these activities to demonstrate the value you’re providing. The “optics” on this can be phenomenal. If you don’t do this, how else will your customer know what value you’re personally bringing to the transaction?
Ensure that you have a credible online presence.
Maintaining a professional online presence ranks right up there with breathing in terms of its importance to sales success. At the risk of understatement, if you don’t have a professional online presence, you may be undermining your credibility, especially if you hope to attract young buyers. At a minimum, a professional online profile shows that you’re a real person to prospects who haven’t met you yet. More meaningfully, a professional profile communicates your credentials, the kinds of customers you serve, and a sense of your personality. “Buyers use social profiles to qualify the people they talk to,” says Justin Shriber, vice president of marketing for LinkedIn Sales and Marketing Solutions, referring to a recent study of B2B buyers and sellers on the network. “Before, it was primarily salespeople trying to learn about buyers. Now it’s the opposite as well.” If you haven’t done so already, prioritize establishing a professional profile online, and use a high-quality photo that captures the type of image you want to convey to customers.
Do one small thing to immediately demonstrate trustworthiness.
Credibility is built in both big and small ways, and most often it’s the small ways that make the biggest impressions. Do this by accomplishing mini-commitments early in a client relationship. For example, if you tell a customer, “I will call you back in fifteen minutes,” call back at exactly that time marker to demonstrate you can be trusted to do what you say you’re going to do.
Promote awards, accolades, and reviews.
There’s a reason restaurants and hair salons cover their walls with media coverage of their businesses: it’s instant credibility. Showcasing your own third-party awards, accolades, reviews, media coverage, and publicity can be an extremely credible way to build confidence in what you’re selling.
Just a reminder here to be cautious of displaying sales awards if you’re in financial services, health care, insurance, or any other industry where there is sensitivity to the idea of being “sold”—or even to the idea of being a “customer” (versus a patient, for example). Few people want to be reminded that they are a number in somebody’s sales quota. If you’re in one of these industries and you receive an award with the word “sales” in it from your company or a supplier, ask if the language can be rewritten to be more customer-centric, so you can display it without causing unease.
Ask your customer if she has any concerns.
After you’ve engaged the interest of your customer, ask if she has any concerns about what you’ve discussed. By putting the question on the table, you have a chance to address any unspoken issues your customer may have, which gives you the opportunity to resolve them.
Emphasize warranties, return or exchange policies, and the kind of service your customer can expect after the sale.
Women will often fast-forward to worst-case scenarios in high-stakes purchases. They weigh the risks and try to determine whether they can count on you to stand by the product should something go wrong.2 This means it’s important to proactively address the types of communication and service they can expect after the sale. Warranties, returns, and postsale service can be an important part of the confidence-building conversation; don’t skimp on this information.
Showcase the resources and team members behind you.
Showcasing the resources available to your customers can be a great confidence builder for them. If you have a team, communicate that they, too, are standing behind your customer, ready to provide support for any needs.
Keep your customers in the know.
Information is social currency, and women tend to view themselves as lifelong learners. To maintain your status as an expert resource, build time in your day to read about customers, competitors, marketplace trends, and your industry. As much as you can, share trends and information with your customers, proactively send articles of interest, and consider writing/posting your thoughts on industry issues.
Know your competition, and be prepared to articulate how you are different and better.
Be prepared to discuss how your product or service is meaningfully different from your closest competitors’. It’s shocking how many people don’t do this, or don’t even know how they’re different. I once mystery-shopped a home-building company and asked the sales consultant working in a model home, “What’s the difference between your development and the subdivision across the street?” The answer: “They’re pretty similar, I guess. It depends on what you want.” Not exactly competitive differentiation. While we’re here, the phrase “It depends on what you want” can make you sound disinterested, if you leave the words hanging in the air. But if you follow up with information about choices, you can instead inspire confidence.
Talk about trade-offs to enhance your credibility.
Everything in life is a trade-off, and this goes for the products and services you’re selling. Your customer already knows this. When you proactively bring up trade-offs between the options you offer, you show that you’re not hiding any “gotchas,” and this can increase your customers’ confidence in your guidance.
Let customers know how a product has improved over time.
If your product is something people only buy a handful of times in their lives, be sure to let them know how much it’s changed for the better. If you grew up sleeping on your grandparents’ lumpy pullout couch during summer vacations, for example, you might be hesitant to buy a sleeper sofa as a grown-up. Turns out, sleeper sofa beds are great now. Who knew? (The furniture industry, that’s who.) There are so many products that have changed dramatically over the past decade. Your customer may have preconceived notions, rooted in past experiences, which could stand in the way of a sale. When appropriate, ask your customer about the last time she bought your product, and if it has significantly changed for the better since then, make sure she knows.
Show customers how well you treat others.
Your customers are watching how you treat others. This doesn’t just mean members of your own team; they’re noticing how you treat everyone from restaurant servers to taxi drivers to administrative assistants. Demonstrate in all your actions that you are a courteous, kind person who deserves to be trusted with your customers’ hard-earned money. This behavior gives your customer confidence that you will treat her well too.
Manage mistakes in a way that inspires confidence for the future.
When you handle a mistake well, your customers can end up being more loyal to you than if a mistake had never occurred in the first place. I once met a grocery-store manager who fondly recalled one of his favorite mistakes, which had been made in the store’s bakery department. A woman had ordered two cakes for a church event, and when she arrived to pick them up, there were mistakes on both. It had been a specialty order, so the customer was understandably upset. To make up for it, the manager apologized, waived the cost of both cakes, and then did something that earned her loyalty—and the business of her friends—for a very long time. He offered her two free cakes to bring to church every Sunday for the next month. The customer was so delighted that she spread word throughout the congregation. People from the church would stop the manager in the aisle to introduce themselves and thank him for the cakes. He gained new customers from that initial mistake; the way he handled it inspired confidence.
Communicate while resolving mistakes.
Mistakes will always happen, and sometimes they can take several steps and time to sort out. Keeping people informed every step of the way, in terms of mistake management, is crucial. Withholding information compounds the problem and just makes people angry. We’ve all seen what happens at airports when an airline has a long delay and provides no details to the passengers; this is when mobs form. Regular communication helps defuse high-emotion situations and makes customers feel confident you are in control and working proactively on resolving the problem. Your customers want to feel like you are “on it.”
Build confidence in your pricing.
We live in a world in which customers can not only compare prices between providers, but in many cases they can learn (or make an educated guess on) the wholesale price that a company is paying for its products. This has changed the nature of negotiation for many businesses. A look at how one car manufacturer has adapted to the wide availability of car pricing online is instructive.
BEST PRACTICE
Lexus
Building Customer Confidence at the Dealership
For decades, haggling has been a stress point for car buyers, who have often lacked the confidence that dealerships will give them a fair price unless they fight tooth and nail for it. If you’re a luxury automotive brand, how do you flip the script and earn customers’ trust before they even walk through the dealership door? If you’re Lexus, you revise the playbook.
Lexus has launched a breed of dealership, called “Lexus Plus,” which offers up-front, negotiation-free pricing. At Lexus Plus dealerships—there are a dozen of them, as of this writing—the price listed on a vehicle is the price the customer pays. This means no haggling. No worrying that you’re paying more than another customer for the same car. No please-wait-here-while-I-get-my-manager, because there’s one point of contact for each customer.
I visited Rohrich Lexus in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to see how this new dealership model works. “Our car-buying experience is now crafted around the guest, not the price,” says Kevin Whalen, principal of Rohrich Automotive Group and a longtime owner of multiple dealerships. “Customers have the confidence that they’re paying the same, competitive price without having to fight for it.” Whalen has seen customer expectations shift dramatically over his years in the business. People spend nearly triple the amount of time searching for a car online than they do off line,3 which means walking into a dealership has become a “moment of truth” for both buyer and seller. How has this changed the role of the sales professional?
“The era of ‘Can I help you?’ is over,” says Whalen, referring to the standard greeting expected from sales professionals. “Technology raises the consumers’ expectations. The sales professional has to be not only an expert on the vehicle, but also an expert on every aspect of the ownership experience from Lexus, not just the car.”
With price off the table, Lexus Plus conversations shift from the topic of buying to the topic of owning. “I don’t have to spend hours convincing a customer that Lexus is a great product,” says Dave Clugston, a sales professional at Rohrich. “The customer already knows that. I need to let them experience it. My approach is to show them what it’s going to be like to drive the car every day, and how easy it is to use features like voice technology. I’ll introduce them to the service department and tell them that we’ll be able to pick up their car and bring it in for appointments, to make it convenient for them. I tell my customers, ‘All you need to do is drive it, and Lexus will take care of you.’ Ultimately, I’m selling them on the experience of being a Lexus owner.”
The combination of transparent pricing and a long-term ownership perspective has high appeal for women buyers. “Women express higher satisfaction with the Lexus Plus experience,” confirms Peggy Turner, vice president of Lexus guest retention and satisfaction, citing data from participating dealerships across the United States. “They feel more in control with the up-front process than with the traditional buying experience. The guest works directly with one person throughout the entire purchase process. We also learned they’re more likely to recommend purchasing from a Lexus Plus dealer.”
Lexus Plus is an answer for building customer confidence when automotive pricing information is available all over the web, and customers—especially young ones—expect transparency from the companies with which they do business. Is it for everyone? No. At least not yet. For some people, haggling over the price of a car is a long-standing tradition, like eating turkey on Thanksgiving. But as with everything else in our transformational age, once people experience the ease and convenience of new options, and more importantly, trust them, broader adoption may follow. There are precedents, after all: used-car superstore CarMax built its empire on a haggle-free foundation. Saturn was a fixed-price operation before General Motors shut it down. Tesla and Costco are no-haggle sellers, as are a variety of dealerships of various makes throughout the United States.
As we have seen, instilling confidence in customers is a function of big things—like pricing strategy at Lexus Plus dealerships—and small things, like everyday personal interactions. How does one of the biggest dealmakers in commercial real estate instill confidence in clients? I asked her.
BEST PRACTICE
Q&A with Meredith O’Connor, International Director and Chairman of Headquarters Practice Group, JLL
Meredith O’Connor works on headline-making deals as a leader at real estate professional services firm JLL. She represented Toyota on the relocation of the company’s North American headquarters from Torrance, California, to Plano, Texas, one of the biggest corporate moves in modern history. She also represented Toyota and Mazda on their high-profile selection of a $1.6 billion plant in Huntsville, Alabama, in 2018. A native Chicagoan, she represented the Barack Obama Foundation for the site selection of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in that city. No one works on deals at this level without earning the confidence of clients. I talked with O’Connor about how she does it.
How would your clients describe you?
I would hope they would say that I am a tireless advocate for their needs. I always put the client first.
How do you differentiate yourself?
I find that telling people you can save them money is an attention grabber, at least in terms of having them listen to what you have to say. But just as important is having a good story. The question you have to ask is, what is your best story about your work? How do you build it and make it your own? That is what life is about. One of my good stories is that we [JLL] know how to keep a secret. The Toyota move from Torrance to Plano was one of the best-kept economic development secrets in history. We kept the secret from start to finish.
What is your work style?
I’m a 24/7 kind of person. People in high-level positions expect responsiveness. The idea of “I’ll get back to you within twenty-four hours” seems like an eternity now. It really should be a lot faster. I would never go to sleep at night without finishing today’s emails, because it is just not acceptable anymore to wait any longer.
How do you earn a client’s trust?
By protecting their interests, by doing everything you are told, and by always working your hardest to get them the best deal you can. That is what we did for Toyota, and that is why we have gotten the chance to work with them more than once.
What is your client-engagement style?
If someone asks me for three examples, I try to give them five. I think it is important that when somebody asks you to do something, you do just a little bit more, because that little bit more makes you better, and you are differentiating yourself from the average person. I have spent my life trying to do a little bit more, which is probably why I have five kids.
What is your pet peeve?
I hate when people have a message on the bottom of their email that says, “Please excuse the typos.” I think it is a bad idea, because it just shows that they do not read what they send. To me, it’s silly.
What is one thing you never do?
I never get involved in the negative. It takes energy to not get along with people. I always try to take the high road and get along with everyone. I think it is really important that people think you are a nice person. In this business that goes a long way.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Giving customers a little bit more than they expect, as Meredith O’Connor does, can make a big impact on their impression of you.
• Customers’ confidence increases when you successfully curate product choices, as Sephora does.
• Third-party credibility and an online professional presence are important for earning customers’ confidence.
• Selling the experience of being your long-term customer, as Lexus does, increases customers’ confidence that they’ll receive value beyond the product price.
ACTIVATING YOUR INSIGHTS
• In what ways can you give your customers just 5 percent more than they’re expecting (in terms of service), every time?
• Revisit your online professional profile. Is it up to date? Does it create a compelling impression of your capabilities? If you don’t have a professional profile, make it a priority to create one.
• What analog activities in your own business could you bolster with technology, similar to the way Sephora uses technology to bolster customer confidence in its company and products?