Individualization as the Means of Sounding Human During Sales While Still Achieving Efficiency

It has been a little over two months since I officially switched over to a new job. The position involves daily communication with various students dreaming of going to top schools around the world, as well as their often anxious parents, with the ultimate aim of selling consulting services that improve every aspect of their university applications. The first weeks on the job have been about learning the different services on offer, what would be enticing and persuasive from the perspective of potential clients, and how to verbalize the benefits our services ultimately provide.

As I slowly build up experience on the job, deepening my understanding of the services and the mentality of potential clients, some patterns are beginning to emerge. While it is hard to summarize concisely, there are verbal cues that indicate a lack of interest, typical profiles that indicate some services are worth mentioning, and visual expressions that indicate prices are too steep. Catching these during conversations and acting upon such information during the process of pitching relevant services is a key skill that will ensure the continued success of myself and all others involved in selling.

But unfortunately, as the patterns become easier to catch and act upon, the mind does become lazier, showing a greater tendency to automatically categorize clients with the slightest pockets of information, and assign an almost template solution for each of the categories. The result is an increasing tendency for conversations to fall into scripted processes suitable for one of the perceived categories, and the following interactions, via text messages, emails, and phone calls, to center on following through the process, rather than thinking about what else can potentially be valuable to bring up in the interactions.

It is worth emphasizing how damaging this "template process" approach to communication can be,  in terms of derailing conversations with potential clients. Applying to universities, particularly to top ones in the US and the UK, is an exercise in individualization. The more customized the content, the more unique the perspectives, and the more innovative the details, the greater chance of being accepted. So naturally, conversations before the application actually take place should also focus on how different each candidate is from all others. Templated methods of communication make this discovery of uniqueness difficult.

As such, finding some sort of individualization in conversation, even if it is limited, would go a long way in ensuring some level of consistency between pitching products and delivering them later on. Each client should expect their case, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go to a top university, to be handled with the utmost care, not just one of many in a nameless assembly line. Having customized conversations, pointing to the uniqueness of each student, almost as a matter of habit, can provide at least some assurances that mass production does not ruin chances of success.

Yet, to approach every conversation in a completely ad hoc way is simply impossible. Given that most products are often the same (even if delivered differently), the process of explaining them will be similar for everyone interested in those products. To be efficient in providing the right information in the most time-efficient manner, standardization in verbal communication is still the foundation of good sales pitches. Comments tailored to the situation of every student will have to be the flourishes that make create visible differentiation between every conversation that involves the same end goal of selling products.

That said, how and how much to individualize every standardized conversation is a difficult question to answer. Every student and parent has a different level of tolerance for formulaic sales pitches, and each would also have a different amount of materials that are available for readily generated customizations. The key to what seems to be unique conversations remains a high level of perceptive capability, always catching the slightest insights that can be picked up and creating an extensive conversation that diverges from the usual script.

Ultimately, individualization is about readiness to do something else when there is no absolute need to. Being aware of the overall structure of conversations is important when communicating set information is the primary purpose of any conversation. But that does not mean the information provider has to deny or forego any possibility of a conversation becoming more mobile or flexible. Having a standardized end goal is always great, but never forget that getting to the same goal can involve some possibilities of path dependency. Being available to explore different means to fulfill an end will be important for personalizing sales.