How to make a sale when your customer and consumer is not same?

Well, this is a very common problem among the startups today. I met a tech Entrepreneur who was into building an online retail space. The service was somewhere build keeping in mind the consumers (the common people) of service and the real customers (the shopping malls in his case) were not even considered while designing the whole product.
To understand the scale of problem let us first of all go back to basics. A customer is a person who pays you in exchange of a service or a product and A consumer is a person who consumes it. In most of the cases, they are not same. Especially, when you deal Business to Business, the scenario is common. I have seen many startups failing on selling their product or understanding the right customer. Here is step by step solution:

1) Find the right customer: If you are selling a Toffee to a kid, keep in mind he is a consumer and many a times, his parents or guardians are real customers. Similarly, in many cases your customer is some organisation but consumer of your service or product are the employees or may be the customers the organisation serves. The problem here is that we design our product as per the consumer and forget that customer is the king. It might happen that the customer won't buy your product even if it is the need of consumers. Startups working on Training, Development, Jobs and Placements, Delivery services will be able to relate.

2) Develop your product keeping both in mind: Your product, in such cases, should not only benefit the consumer but the customer as well. A crying kid is a problem of the parents, every Kinder Joy not only focused on making kids happy but solved the problem of a sad and crying kid for its parents, the real customers. Faculty Development Programs not only helps the Faculties(consumer of service) of colleges(customer of service), but also helps the colleges deliver their best to students (college's consumer). So, a product must be built around both of them to make it a sellable product.

3) Pitch the right owner: This is the real issue. Going through a process may really delay the sale or even cancel the deal. So, even if you have identified the right customer, the right decision maker is still to be found. In case of a family, the mother and the father are right owners and decision makers for certain products range. Or in case of an industry, the right person to meet might be HRs of the company, but not the right owner and decision makers. Remember, anything can be sold to the right owners and decision makers in an organisations.

4) Sell what you are supposed to: Now this is very important. Even if your product is made to deliver high value to your consumers, but it might not attract the customers many times, and vice versa. Show what benefits the customer will have, once he buys your product or pays for your service. Big manufacturing companies outsource the workshop level work to small industrial units, not because their work is efficient or of good quality. But because having and maintaining an in-house moulding workshop costs higher.

5) Many Potential Customers won't pay for enhancing services: Understand this with a very basic example. Food is considered a basic need for humans, they pay for it. But only 1 out 20 people avail services like Gymming, Clubbing or may be Travelling.
In case of B2B selling, if you position your product/ service as a core need of an organisation, probability of making a sale goes high. Smart Classrooms are the right examples to it. But if you position it like your service or product can enhance the service or product of the organisation, chancesvof a sale are very low. In this case, you will find handful of customers only, and that too not because they wanted to buy it, but because you wanted to sell it.

6) Retain the customer and the consumers as well: Retaining Customers is a need of business. Even if one of them seems dissatisfied, you might loose your customer. For example, you sell a gift item to your customer, and it does not makes the person who is being gifted happy or surprised, your customer will never comeback again. But if it really delights the consumer, you win a customer forever. This can be best done by finding out why a customer is interested in buying your product. This might differ. A school wants to train students on Human Values and Social Skills because the students do not behave well in school and in turn harms the infrastructure, might be an intention behind getting the students trained on it. In this case if the trainer trains the students on Human Values and Social skills because he wishes to make them a responsible citizen, will not satisfy the customer, as both customer and trainer have different vision. That is it.

So, if in any case you find you are not able make a sale, go through these six amazing steps and get it done and dusted.