Customer Focused Sales Skills: The Top 3 Most Underutilized

What Does Customer Focus Really Mean?
Many sales leaders talk about customer focused sales skills, yet “customer centricity” remains one of the most overused and misunderstood phrases in business. At its most basic, customer-focused selling is about purposefully placing the customer at the center of your business — making their needs your top priority. Sounds smart — but it barely scratches the surface.

True Customer Focus
Real customer focus goes beyond basic responsiveness. It means seeing the world through your customer’s eyes — and even the eyes of their customers. To be genuinely customer-focused, you must understand not only what your customers want but also why they want it, what drives their priorities, and how they define success.

Success comes from framing your approach in terms of your customer’s goals — not your own sales objectives. When you step fully into their world, anticipate their challenges, and align your solutions to their aspirations, you move from simply selling to truly creating value. That’s when customer focus stops being a buzzword and becomes a differentiated sales advantage.

Three Often Overlooked Customer-Focused Sales Skills

To boost revenue, win rates, and long-term client relationships, start by equipping your sales team with the ability to consistently identify three areas highlighted by sales rep assessment data:

1. Your Clients’ Desired Outcomes
   To truly support your clients, you need to uncover what they aim to achieve—both from a business and personal perspective. This requires:
   • Pinpointing the most urgent challenges your target clients face.
   • Understanding how these challenges rank in their list of priorities.
   • Recognizing the consequences if these challenges remain unresolved.
   • Defining what a successful solution looks like in their own words and from their perspective.
2. The Available Resources at Their Disposal
   Once you understand your client’s desired personal and professional outcomes, the next customer focused sales skill is identifying the resources they can bring to bear — people, time, and budget. This allows you to assess whether your solution is truly the right fit for their needs.

   This consultative selling skill isn’t about locking the client into a precise budget. Rather, it’s about ensuring there’s a natural alignment between what they are willing to invest and what it realistically takes to help them achieve their goals — doing so with tact, insight, and credibility.

3. The Decision Maker and Decision Making Process
   Once desired outcomes are clear and budget parameters are understood, one of the most underutilized customer focused sales skills is the ability to identify the true decision maker and understand the full decision-making process. This insight allows you and your sales team to determine whether winning the business is feasible and how best to position your solution.

   Too often, business sales training participants tell us that they overlook who holds decision authority, the sequence of steps leading to the final decision, and the criteria that will ultimately drive the choice. Mastering this skill ensures you focus your efforts strategically, rather than chasing opportunities without a clear path to success.

The Bottom Line
To genuinely drive your customers’ success, you must step fully into their world. Invest in customer focused sales skills and processes that shift your perspective from what you are selling — products, features, and benefits — to how you can enable their success. This requires framing every solution through the lens of the customer, ensuring your approach aligns with their goals, priorities, and definition of success.

To learn more about taking your sales skills to the next level, download The Top Sales Skills to Challenge Customers

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.