A lot in life is about doing the right thing at the right time: asking for a favor when someone is likely to grant it, applying for a job when you’re a good fit, approaching your boss for a promotion when you’ve demonstrated your merit, and making a sale when the customer has a need and you’ve proven you have the optimal means of addressing it.
Although these scenarios vary, they have common factors. All are easier said than done, and each involves timing and presentation. However, success in any isn’t dependent on luck or fate. In no case is this truer than in the last, i.e., convincing customers that your product or service is the best solution to a problem and that, as such, they should purchase it.
Like most objectives worth pursuing, making a high-volume or high-cost sale typically requires thoughtful preparation and skillful execution. This applies to the messages you convey prior to closing a sale as it does to making the sale itself. Indeed, whether it’s presented digitally, in print, or face to face, marketing information is a key element in making a sale happen. This fact dictates the different kinds of marketing content your company must create, and it also determines when in the sales process you should share it for maximal effectiveness.
The types of marketing information available to customers and the order in which they’re exposed to them is important because, with the exception of OEMs who’ve already designed your solution into their end products, few customers wake up thinking that today is the day they’re going to buy your offering. Love at first sight might happen in the movies, but it seldom strikes in a sales situation. Instead, much as in everyday life, where we first meet people, then get to know them, and finally either do or don’t accept them, a customer buys a product by first becoming aware of it, then considering it, and, at last, if all goes well, by preferring and purchasing it. Each of these stages in the buying process is accompanied by communications that encourage and, ideally, lead customers on to the ensuing stage.
In my next post, I’ll discuss in greater detail how such communications must be designed and sequenced to pull customers through the marketing and sales funnel, incite them to purchase, and help your company meet and exceed its sales quotas.
Ronald-Stéphane Gilbért, Global and Content Marketing Practice Director— Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Cleveland
