When Your Customer Is Ready

November 4, 2009 by · 10 Comments

Perfect follow through

Your customer is rarely ready now. They may be ready in time if you remain relevant; however, this takes work and care. Work is in the way you communicate and deliver what is valuable with your prospective buyer. Care comes in the way you own the problems your buyer has. It has much less to do with your desire to sell and everything to do with what is important to your customer. There is an old saying, “A carpenter doesn’t buy a drill. They are buying a quarter-inch hole.” That is results-thinking not features and benefits.

Assume that most people you first engage with are not ready to buy. You are out of phase with where they are at today more often than not. There is a setup which has to be addressed to prepare them to buy. This setup fosters trust and increases your value proposition. It is made up of the following:

1. Promotion: The marketplace is a super-highway of choices. There are too many good choices out there, and it is hard to distinguish what is valuable and what is not. Value is continually changing based on what is needed by the buyer. If it is not needed, then there has to be promotion to increase desire. Promotion largely focuses on the quarter-inch hole and driving home the message that you are the best way to make the hole.

2. Profiling: You get the wrong messages all the time. When you are marketed with cat food as a dog lover or junk food as a Whole Foods shopper, the seller missed big. They are selling on hope. They are hoping you are the one they are looking for. There are too many available and appropriate systems to make connecting the right message at the right time with the right person happen. If you invest in these systems and make them work, you are connecting. If you are ok with luck and knowing that 95% of your mailers, emails and impressions won’t work, then keep following the masses and keep wasting your bullets. You may not get a second chance to make a true connection.

3. Pain: This is where sellers make the biggest mistake. They have bad manners and start selling. Who cares what you have to offer if you don’t understand my pain? Did you bother to ask, and have you articulated? You must describe the pain concretely and specifically. This is both for the benefit of the buyer and the seller. The buyer feels you know their situation. You need to know their situation to be of value and service. Amplify the pain and spend 90% of your energy understanding and communicating this to the buyer. It makes selling a formality.

4. Proof: If you are telling the world how great you are, your credibility is low. If someone else is saying it, then you are positioned with a stranger perfectly, especially if it is the same pain story. Package the medium to share the story. Make the story the same as each of your prospective customers. It will go a much longer way investing in the stories made alive than puffing up your image.

Your prospective customer wants to buy. The question is whether it is from you or someone else who establishes trust by dating them and helping them become ready. Too many businesses misstep by how they approach and court the buyer. With so many choices, not doing your homework and setting up a one-to-one buying process only helps to strengthen your competitors’ appeal. Help your customer pick you by making them ready. It is all about buying. Leave the selling to the other guys.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Miscellany, Sales Process · Tagged: , ,

Caught Selling

February 8, 2009 by · 1 Comment

As I was in the waiting room of an office, I could see the inevitable.  A buyer and a seller were missing each other; the same script being played out.  The professional seeking to sell his services is telling the buyer how great they are and what they have to offer.

If you turned the sound off, you could see the buyer going through the same motions as anyone who is being sold.  They start resisting, and the tension feels higher than necessary.  They are set up to say, “No,” rather than salivate for the value the seller has.

Have you ever caught yourself selling?  Once this happens, you start engaging in the ritual which causes the buyer to want to say, “No.”

Today, people are quick to say, “No,” for many reasons.  Imagine yourself peddling newspapers.  A guy is walking down the street towards you but quickly reacts instead of engages.  He kindly declines.  The scenario, similar to many others as well, is set up to fail.  The process, the method of connecting and the system for buying is not congruent with how you like to buy.

If you are caught selling, how about stopping the tape?  Here are likely reasons you are in the sales death roll:

  1. Lack of Positioning: You are not perceived as valuable.  You may be too casual or perceived as a commodity. There are many people, products and services like you. You may have done a poor job of helping them perceive value beyond the commodity in who you are and what you offer.
  2. Your Buying Process Is Boring: If the way you do business is always about a handshake and a smile, then think about how you appear to the buyer who moves through a month buying hundreds of goods and services.  You are competing with the experience each of those companies, brands and products is delivering – Nordstrom, Rain Forest Cafe, Starbucks, Apple – how does your buying experience match up?  They have standards from buying based on the value other businesses have set as an expectation.
  3. You Think About Yourself: Why should someone pick you?  If your answer starts with these words, “We,” “I,” and “Us,” then you lose.  The buyer does not care about you.  They want to know how you help them, make them more money and bring peace of mind to their world.  They want to hear you talk in terms of them, not you.  If you have been in conversations around vain people, you know what it feels like.
  4. They Believe You Want to Sell, Not Help: This is closely aligned with number 3 above.  This is about authenticity, motive and genuineness.  If you are focused on helping, then the buyer can sense this.  If you are focused on selling, then there is a guard that goes up.  Helping has you thinking about what the buyer is trying to accomplish.  They are not trying to buy your stuff. They are trying to solve a problem, make money, connect with people, have more peace, feel good about themselves, and an array of other true motives.  How does what you do help them?  Talk this way to avoid selling.
  5. You Don’t Have Value: What makes you different?  Good service is not different.  It is an expectation.  If a buyer perceives that you are the same as everyone else who does what you do, then they have a valid reason to treat you as a commodity.  Your articulation of value is a ruse, not a reality.  Make it real and communicate it.  No gimmicks. Making it real is hard work.  Do the hard work.

I enjoy watching Jim Carrey perform.  He is remarkable at contorting his behaviors to get us to laugh in an instant.  He also helps us break the scripts.  When Jim Carrey is inside of a social interaction, he is far from going through the motions, he is imagineering.   Why be captive to a dead end script?  If you are caught selling, you are setting up the buyer to say, “No.”  If you help the person buy and you have the business systems and approach set up to create a new script, the possibilities move towards your favor.  Break your script and redesign your approach.  When you are caught selling, it only shows you have to work your performance in a major way.   Want to learn more about how to change your script to attract more customers?  Take action and avoid the insanity of selling.  Learn what it means to hire AscendWorks business consulting to put together the systems and the scripts for attracting a customer, positioning your brand as valuable and creating a connection.  We create the systems which communicate relevantly and on-demand with your prospective customer through marketing and sales automation.  Redesign the script.

Filed Under: Blog, Miscellany · Tagged: , , , ,