The Buyers’ Journey Has Changed
Buyers are no longer making decisions based on long, complex research and committee decisions. Today it’s harder to make old school sales work. Few execs will take a cold call or return an email or voicemail. And marketing may have a more difficult job finding and articulating the advantages of your product/service over competitors.
With 20 minutes on the Internet using Google Search, your prospects have access to:
- industry expert opinions and commentary
- peer evaluations and advice
- thousands of inexpensive, cloud-based apps
- plentiful self-service demos and free trials
Prospects are evaluating your brand on criteria like:
- how trustworthy you are
- the quality of the service and support you offer
- your ability to understand their challenges, and respond quickly
- how authentic and genuine your employees are
Smack in the middle of this journey is the opportunity for your frontline salespeople to successfully identify and persuade prospects of your advantages over competitors so that they see a logical path to your product or service.
It’s a noisy world on the Internet, and hard to be heard amidst the noise and hype. Executives are inundated with the spam of business life. How can you make your brand stand out?
The New Social Sales Playbook
A modern social sales playbook can help you play to how today’s prospects makes a decision to buy. It takes discipline, but turning the techniques of social selling into good habits is the best way to make sure that your company is a big blip on the radar screen when they are ready to make their decision.
A new social sales playbook is one that sets perceptions about you and your brand. It:
1. Plays by the customer’s rules, not to your convenience, and thus puts your company front and center as the buying process moves forward.
2. Builds trust. By being generous with information and expertise without expectation of a sale, when your prospect is ready to buy, you are a familiar, trusted option representing your company — a face they know, a voice they trust.
3. Generously offers the best advice and information — content from industry leaders, experts, analysts, and others. With this philosophy, your prospect is well-informed and positioned to see the value in your products or services.
4. Is visible to prospects on all the channels where they work and play, so your team is positioned to offer guidance and make it more likely for your company to play a prominent role in the customer buying journey.
5. Provides a scaffolding where you can monitor what is said about your industry, and products, so you can gracefully insert yourself to show the value and benefits of your product, especially in situations where your competitors are appearing.
Ongoing, we’ll be bringing you the best information and tactics to help you flesh out your sales playbook. We hope you’ll participate, reach out for specific advice, and comment. You can email me any time!
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