3 Keys to Completely Understanding Your Customer’s Needs

The main driver of providing a great customer sales experience is making sure your customer feels like their needs are completely understood by you—their Sales Consultant.

Before you dive into determining your customer’s needs, let them know that you are going to be thorough. You can explain the process by saying, “I want to completely understand your needs today, so I’m going to ask you quite a few questions to ensure I get it right for you.”

The three keys to completely understanding your customer’s needs are the following types of questions that will help you build rapport and learn more about your customer and their interests:

1. Introductory Questions: Open-ended questions to begin exploring new topics so you can truly start to understand your customer’s needs.
   • E.g., Tell me about your current vehicle.
2. Follow-up Questions: Open-ended or closed-ended questions to obtain additional information or clarification about a topic. These are great to begin building rapport.
   • E.g., What do you want your new vehicle to provide that your current vehicle does not?
3. Summarizing/Confirming Questions: Questions used to check your understanding of the customer’s needs and to demonstrate to the customer that you are listening.
   • E.g., It sounds like you are looking for a larger SUV that offers All-Wheel Drive. Is that correct?

Each customer is unique. Your role in fully understanding your customer’s needs is to ask a lot of open-ended and follow-up questions to uncover their specific needs and expectations and to put them into the right Kia vehicle. Understanding their needs will also help streamline the delivery process, allowing you to focus on explaining the vehicle features and functions that are most important to your customer.  Doing this can help you to win repeat and referral business.

Sincerely,

Sales and Field Operations Team
Kia America, Inc.