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.

Here’s how to sell without results.  Start selling like the mass majority of sales, marketing and business people out there.  They all want to sell you what they have.  Is that truly what you as the customer are thinking – “I want to be sold?”

Unfortunately, there are many from the school of hard knocks who think getting their way rather than helping you with yours is the mark of getting business done.  Take a look at the mass majority of websites.  Most are boring.  They copy each other and have not enticed me to engage.  Instead, they talk about how great they are hoping to impress me with their stated laurels that I would have to succumb and call them or beg them to sell me their products and services.

Here’s the blind spot the mass majority of businesses and business people have – they can only think about themselves.  It’s a rare company that can think, much less talk, in terms of you.  Those that do actually connect.  They connect with buying.

How does your customer buy?  Why do they buy?  Is it really because they want all the features you worked so hard to bulletize on your brochure, or is that mere geek talk?

I am a customer.  I care little about the tolerances of the cam shafts in my 5 series.  I want the ultimate driving machine and the ultimate driving experience.  This is what connects with me.  Engineering specs are nice to know, but I am converting it to what I want, not what you did.

Stop selling hardware, software, services, advertising, and the array of stuff we have too much of.  Start helping me buy and I may pay attention.  Helping me buy requires you to think about me and not you.  You matter little.  I matter a lot.  You look like a commodity.  I have choices.

Think carefully about your customer and profile what they truly care about.  They are not thinking about you. They are thinking about themselves.  Here are things they are thinking about:

• How do I make more money?
• How do I have more fun?
• How do I find love?
• How do I feel good about myself?
• How do we get customers?
• How do I put my kids through college?
• How do I look my best?

This is the pursuit of happiness we hear about.  We are all pursuing some end as individuals.  Connect with this.  When you sell audio equipment, don’t talk about the bass enhancements.  Talk about how it gives the ultimate fun experience.  If you sell software, don’t bore me with version 15’s new button clicks.  Tell me how this will double my revenue or save me half the time.  Show me concretely, and speak about my problems like you understand them because you are solving the same problem.

It all sounds simple, yet it is quite often missed.  It is missed in what we say, websites we read and the mass amounts of connection points competing for the customer’s attention.  Too bad.  But then again, it may be the opportunity which helps you stand out and start connecting with your customer instead of just bull-dogging them with your selling.  Talk about my problems and not your features and watch a world of opportunity open like you have never seen before.

I am currently wanting to purchase an item.  I have been waiting for several days for a personal response from the salesperson. I have visited the company’s website, but all it does is inform me of how great they are.  The “Contact Us” page only directs me to call the salesperson. The communication from the company consists of boring emails that inform me of how busy they are and that they will respond to me tomorrow. They think they are connecting because they responded via email, but the fact is they missed my buying signals and lost a sale.

Just a few years ago this was how sales were conducted for the most part. Customers depended heavily on a telephone and a ready salesperson. Today this is not the case. The salesperson’s role has changed dramatically and in many cases is irrelevant because the internet has created new buying signals that are digital and not based on a salesperson reading body language and closing the sale.

Today’s buyers are selfish. They want attention when they want it. They buy only when they are ready and they expect you to be ready when they are ready. If not, they simply go somewhere else. They are not thinking about you, they are thinking about themselves.

Five months ago one of our clients conducted business from 9 to 5 and was continually bombarded by frustrated customers who felt they were not heard. Today our client does business 24/7 and has customers who rave about their response. Our client has leveraged the Internet to identify, understand, evaluate, and serve the customer when the customer wants to be noticed. This is what is called a digital buying signal and it has replaced body language. Welcome to the new economy!

Today’s buyer approaches buying much differently than just a few years ago. A few years ago you likely picked up the phone and spoke with a salesperson and let that person know you were interested in buying. Today that’s not so. The buyer in today’s “new economy” is much more interested in forming an opinion and assessing what options they have long before they speak to a salesperson.

So how is a buyer forming opinions and making assessments of their options? They are educating themselves. They are doing this through trusted sources of information such as blogs, websites, e-books, journals, e-newsletters, and forums. The buyer over time is forming solutions based on the information they have gathered that speaks to their pain.

So the question is, how is a buyer in the “new economy” forming opinions about you? Do they find you easily on the Internet? If they find you, is their first impression memorable? Where do they find you on Google? Are you on page one or stuck somewhere deep in the pack? How many times do you appear in a search?

When a customer finds you, do they find it easy to get the information they want and to get it when they want it? Or do they end up having to wait for you to respond? Do you have a “breadcrumb trail” that leads the customer to a predictable experience, or is it all by luck and sales persuasion?

Many companies unfortunately put the majority of their time and effort towards the selling process and little time and effort on the buying process. This leads to frustration and mediocre sales results. In the “new economy” you must align the selling and buying process, or you’ll find a steady erosion of relevance, influence, and value. The “new economy” is not going away. It is only going to become more pronounced.

The biggest secret in business is right in front of you. Take out your credit card receipt from last month. Review it. Do any of the items stand out? How many could you have done without for another month? How many could you have done without period?

The question begs asking, why did you buy? How did you buy? Whether you realized it or not, you “bought” long before you purchased. It started when you began noticing watches, TV’s, or whatever it was that caught your interest.

Your attention moved to desire. You pictured the object or service bringing pleasure, relieving pain or increasing value in your life.

At some point the desire hit a tipping point. It was fanned through consistent, credible or intriguing exposure. Read more