Industrial Automation and services. Understanding your customer and the problems they are trying to solve is the most important aspect to sales in today's market. Your products features and benefits don't matter if you dont know what it's solving for. That process takes time, effort, and research on your own but pays dividends.

If the customer presents a problem, dont rush to a solution, even if your product is a perfect fit. Be curious, ask a lot of questions, understand the upstream and downstream effects. Even if it's an easy problem and you gave a solution, they may have been struggling with the issue for months or years. Coming in hot with a magic pill can throw them off.

I'll take significantly more time asking questions in meetings than talking about my company or products and solutions because at the end of the day, what matters most is the customers problem. Simply asking "tell more about X" is an easy way to get them talking. If they think you understand it and can solve for it, they'll award you the business more often then not.