Don’t sell your prospects – educate them
By Andrew Shedden
The first step to effectively marketing your product or service is to strongly position your company. You can position your company as being the fastest, most reliable, most knowledgeable, or having any other number of identifiable and desirable traits. Once you’ve strongly differentiated your company by articulating a strong position you’re much more likely to get noticed in your marketplace. But then what?
The second step to marketing success comes from making a commitment to knowledge based marketing. If you want your company to be a leader in the knowledge based economy you’re going to need to radically change your thinking about pushing products and services. If your marketing is based on the old selfish model of taking rather than giving you’ll soon begin to notice an erosion of your market share.
Here’s The Paradox
Many of you who suffered through university philosophy classes will remember the great importance ascribed to logic. The following statement will certainly get the wannabe Cartesians into a serious twist: Once you stop selling your products and services you’ll begin to sell record numbers of your products and services. That’s right folks, once you stop selling your products and services you’ll begin to sell record quantities of your products and services. But how can this be?
The Single Biggest Buying Fear
If you were to ask 100 business owners what their single biggest customer concern is the vast majority would tell you price. While price is obviously an important factor it’s not the most important factor. The single biggest customer concern is making a bad purchasing decision. Because companies are cut to the bone they can’t afford to make a purchasing mistake. A bad purchasing decision could be catastrophic to their bottom line and must be avoided at all costs.
One of the ways companies hope to avoid purchasing mistakes is to get more staff members involved in buying decisions through the formation of buying teams. The intention of buying teams is to promote collective responsibility and more balanced decision making processes.
While great on paper, buying teams have made life very difficult for sellers. The rise of buying teams has greatly lengthened the selling cycle. Many of these teams offer glacial rates of decision making and some are staffed with professional buck passers.
Many team members feel overwhelmed and are finding it increasingly difficult to make wise decisions. When you combine the communications clutter out there with the ever increasing number of choices is it any wonder buyers are feeling confusion? For savvy marketers there is great opportunity in this confusion.
Smart marketers know that people don’t buy products and services for what they are but rather for what they do. Companies that provide answers and assist buyers in making informed decisions are perceived as high value partners. This is the underlying foundation for education based marketing
The three steps required in education based marketing are easy to implement and will provide you with a profitable edge over your competitors.
Step 1 - Pick Out Their Pain
Every target market is unique in terms of its desires, problems, concerns, and pains. The first step in education based marketing is to discover the pain in your target market.
Some ways you can correctly identify the sources of their particular pain are: reading their trade journals, talking to your sales reps, asking prospects in your target market, or putting together online or offline survey and asking prospects what’s keeping them up at night.
You need to enter a dialogue with those found within your target market and be sure you’re speaking about how to cure (not prevent) the pain felt in their particular marketplace.
Consider how your product or service provides meaningful benefits by reducing or eliminating the pain being felt by your prospects within your target market.
Step – 2 Provide Pain Relief On Paper
Once you’ve correctly identified the pain in your target market it becomes a relatively simple second step to provide them with pain relief on paper.
This can be accomplished by providing a report, tip sheet, White Paper, or other helpful information that deals directly with the problems being encountered in your target market.
You can write about: trends, specific problems your salespeople are constantly hearing about, frequently asked questions about the use of your product or service, emerging technologies, or best ways to deal with other troubling areas.
You need to think of how the general benefits of your product or service offering can be used to make life easier and relieve the pain being felt by your target market.
Your report must reveal general benefits NOT the benefits of dealing specifically with your company. This information must be unbiased, fact-based, and can’t be a sales pitch.
Your report should end with the call to action for the next step in your selling process. Do not try to “close the sale” or you’ll destroy the little amount of trust already built. The next step in your selling process could be:
Further information
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Step – 3 Promote your pain relief not your products or services
The third step is to promote your report to your target market. Because the goal of education based marketing is to generate prospects you need to avoid the temptation of selling your company, products, or services. The only thing you should be selling in any of your your initial promotional materials is the benefit (pain relief) your reader will receive by reading your report. In effect you are offering them your free report in exchange for their contact information.
Once your prospects receive your problem solving information you’ll be perceived as a partner instead of a peddler. You’ve taken the first step to forming a solid business relationship. Simply follow up on the phone, ask if they enjoyed your report and if they have any questions, and begin a dialogue.
