1. The Art of Selling Without Being ‘Salesy’
How do you ask a girl out? Do you start with talking about yourself? Do you remind them how you are the best she’ll ever meet? No! (Until, of course, you want to drive them away) Then why do you do it as a brand?
Of course, it is important to convince your target audience about how you or your product are the one-stop solution to the current challenges they’re facing. But think about this - have you really seen doctors go about ‘selling’ their skills/profession? No! They put their stakes on word of mouth marketing. Still, they are one of the highest grossers we know!
That’s the case of services, you’d say. How about products? You just can’t sit back and wait for someone to recommend your product to your target market. You’ve to be aggressive, out there.
Agreed.
But being aggressive ≠ being salesy.
An aggressive salesperson will put his blood and sweat in creating the need for the product/service and solving his prospects’ most pressing challenges. A ‘salesy’ salesperson, on the other hand, will try and convince the prospects that his product/service is right for them irrespective of what their problem is. Aggressive salesperson is targeted; salesy salesperson just wants to meet the targets. Indeed, a very thin line.
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Let’s take another example to understand this better.
“Our core competency is helping struggling outfits like yours get buy-in from bigger clients. We really moved the needle for XYZ corporation, which landed a big contract with Microsoft. Bill Gates called them personally.”
This is pushy.
But the poor chap is just selling his product. What’s wrong with that? Why would anyone find it annoying?
For various reasons.
1.1 Issues with Being ‘Salesy’
You put people off. When your primary motive is to sell a product/service and not solve a problem, you won’t be able to retain prospects. Anyone who’s approaching you is looking for a solution and not to spend some dollars per say. But if you continue to sing your own praises, without even paying heed to their concerns, they’ll tick you off their list already.
You lose the ‘brand’ game. You may achieve another target, close another deal, but it won’t help you build a brand. Eventually, as the customers realize that
you’re not addressing their challenges, they’ll move on. Being salesy may improve your numbers, but you won’t win loyal customers.
It’s a one-way street. If you’re using the ‘elevator pitch’, adding to it some jargons and boasting, you’re walking on a one-way street. If it’s going to be all about you, when are you going to solve the prospect’s problems? This puts off the prospects. Not something you’d want for your brand. But does that mean you stop selling? No. That only means you ‘humanize’ the sales process.
We’ll tell you how.
2. Selling to Humans - How to Be Non-Salesy?
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Your target audience are humans. Your ads and sales pitches can lure them but not engage them. Why? Engagement calls for experiences. You have to be considerate, not pushy. Listen to them, understand their challenges and provide a solution. But first, begin by educating them.
2.1 Help Customers Understand ‘their’ Needs - Educate Before Selling What if we told you that your customers may be more informed than ever before, but they still feel challenged when it comes to finding the
correct solution to their business issues? The key reason - they know about the many features of the products/services but have no clue about the benefits.
Educating your customers about your product/service is important for creating demand. You need to explain them what they can expect while signing up for it. This has to be a core part of your marketing strategy. The question is - how do you deliver this education? We’ll walk you through an easy peasy ways.
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Did You Know - 95% of buyers chose a solution provider that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process
2.2 Think Beyond Content Marketing The first obvious mode of instructing/educating the customers is content marketing. For years, brands have been using content as a key arsenal to
engage prospects. Blog posts, newsletters, whitepapers, ebooks - brands have been exploiting these resources for what seems like forever. You read it right - exploiting - because customers no more seem to be interested in these plain, old bits.
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Web content has reached the saturation point. Pick any topic and search ‘tips’, ‘guides’, and ‘ebooks’ around it. You’ll know what we mean. Thus, your customers are looking for something more. They’re looking for instant gratification. They’re looking for interactivity.
2.3 Bid Adieu to Static Content. Say Hello to Interactive!
Interactive content fits the changing consumer needs. It adds value without your prospects having to commit. It is two-way and adjusts to the user’s behavior while providing a personalized experience. This is probably why you like video tutorials more than plain, boring manuals. Other examples of interactive content include quizzes, calculators, polls, surveys, assessments, and interactive infographics.
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Interactive content also outperforms static content in terms of conversion. Let’s do some number crunching -
What’s more? While static content lets your customers learn about you, interactive content lets you learn more about your customers. Thus, it comes handy in not only educating your prospects but also getting real-time insights into customer behavior.
2.4 Designing Interactive Customer Education Content- Tools You Can Use
When designing exclusive experiences for your prospects, you need specialized tools. Here are our favorites -
Outgrow - Your customers love personalized experiences vs. pushy ads. The solution is interactive content like quizzes and calculators, which try to read into the customer and give suggestions. Quizzes and calculators engage the customer but do not require any commitment. A simple trivia quiz has an average click rate of 41% and average completion rate of 43%. They allow you to share information about your product and get the customer’s perspective as well. They also help in building trust.
Outgrow helps create such tools without any coding. It offers pre-built, optimized templates, and in-built lead forms to help you capture leads. What’s more? You can send the generated leads to Marketo, Mailchimp, HubSpot etc.
SaaS firm VenturePact partnered with Outgrow to build a calculator that helps users estimate the cost of making an app. The result was a 15% boost in traffic and an increase in conversion rate by 28% within just 2 weeks.
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Piktochart - Visuals stay longer in the memory as compared to numbers. This is probably why there’s been an 800% increase in searches on Google for infographics in the last two years.
Piktochart, an infographic design app, helps marketers create beautiful, high quality graphics with little effort.
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ThingLink - A good story enchants like nothing else. Presenting the story behind your brand humanizes it and helps create a personal connection with your prospects. This is why people retain 65 to 70 percent of information shared through stories while only 5 to 10 percent of information through static data or presentation.
Thinglink is a tool that allows tagging photos and videos, which will linkup other related videos, photos or product pages. You can create beautiful brand stories without having to code.
Design with Benefits focuses on the fact that their Homeboy Totebags are designed by former gang members. The founder of the brand, Tania Garbe, says that it makes for a satisfying conversation when someone compliments the bag and also adds value to it.
Comarch - Gamification is the practice of synthesizing the best ideas from gaming, loyalty programs and behavioral economics, with the aim of driving user engagement over indifference. It is based on skills learned from games played as a child and the memories they trigger. The concept is used as a leverage to engage consumers and solve problems. Gamification market is worth more than $2.8 Billion and in the last 3 years has shown almost a 10 fold jump. It has proved to be a successful tool right from marketing to customer onboarding and customer loyalty.
Comarch offers gamification tool through customized plugins to reward the users in the form of badges, leaderboards, challenges etc. All these were governed by the 3F rule -Fun, Friends, and Feedback.
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San Francisco-based Klip, manufacturer of Popchips, faced tough competition from larger brands. As a strategy to build its own brand, they inserted virtual coupons into mobile games. These coupons would pop up as rewards for points and could be redeemed for free bags of chips.
3. Experiences - Taking Customer Education a Step-Ahead
While attempting to educate your prospects, you must do more than just creating content. You must design experiences that wow your customers, experiences that complement other education material.
According to Boston-based 451 Marketing, experiential marketing is the act of “creating unique, face-to-face branded experiences.” Instead of just sending a message to your audience -- digitally or otherwise -- you’re creating an opportunity to interact with your brand in person.
The premise is to create a closer bond between the consumer and the brand by immersing them in a fun and memorable experience.
If a brand stirs genuine positive emotions within people then they are more likely to associate those emotions with that brand, which is more effective than just showing them a Facebook ad or something.
Creating Marketing Experiences that People Want to Pay For
4. Language - Another Aspect of Experiential Marketing
How you talk, what you write - this has as much impact on your prospects as the experiences you create. Language is the soul of your communication. Getting it right is the heart of experiential marketing. Let’s start from the start - writing emails to the prospects.
4.1 How Do You Write Emails ‘To’ the Prospects?
It’s a Monday morning and you’re checking your inbox. You find an email that says ‘Hey Derek! This is Important’. Well, you open the email only to find it starting something like this -
‘Dear Derek,
I am XYZ from ABC Company. We can do amazing SEO for your website and increase the traffic by 5X….’
You don’t read any further and hit the delete button, wondering how did this thing pass through your spam filters. Why? You don’t want to read another promotional email talking in length about what some company can do. Why would you be interested?
Did You Know - An average buyer gets 100+ emails a day, opens just 23%, and clicks on just 2% of them.
Your prospects share the same psyche. They also have spam filters. If you won’t allow anything salesy in your inbox, why would they? Thus, when approaching your prospects through email, pay special heed to the language.
The common mistake marketers make is to write their emails like sales letters. They pack together features of the product, some usual copywriting tricks, and tons of sales slangs. These emails literally shout ‘IN YOUR FACE’ when a prospect reads them. Here’s a perfect example of this -
Delighted to read this? Neither will be your prospects. You’re judged by HOW YOU SELL, no matter what you sell. So it’s time to up your email writing game. Don’t write to your prospects, write for them.
4.2 How to Write an Email ‘For’ Your Prospects
Stick to the Point. Talk about what’s relevant. Discussing the weather neither solves the purpose nor wins you a client. Don’t use flowery words or jargons. Try to focus on a single point in every email. Discussing too many points can literally spoil the broth. You can save your many props and ideas, save them for other touches in your campaign.
Talk about your prospects. If your email is for the prospects, why start with talking about yourselves? Talk about the challenges they face or any recent developments in their business. It shouldn’t make them feel that you’re trying to sing your own praises. Focus on ‘you’, forget the ‘I’.
Example - Start with something like this - ‘Hi John, Congratulations on the new product release/press mention! You and your team have really accomplished something.’
Add some value. A bland email that is nothing more than false praises and fake promises is never going to get the prospect onboard. Instead, ensure your email has some takeaway for the receiver. For instance, inform them of an event they might like or a feature they might want to read. Alternatively, suggest some value add for their business - a feature you think they can add to their product or a promotion strategy that might work for their audience. Example - “Hi Ted! I found an article on [your industry/competition/field] and thought of you”
Offer help. How can someone turn that down? Even if it’s not related to your product, offer to help your prospects. May be refer them to an agency that can do their design work or refer them to a product that can help solve their current business challenges. This goes long way in establishing a relationship with the prospect, one which is not built on promotional lingo but a helpful gesture. Example - “Saw your post about skiing – here are my suggestions.”
Forget the features and highlight the benefits. When you talk about the features, you’re only informing the prospects. However, when you are mentioning the benefits of your product you’re educating them. This tells them how you can solve their problems and helps them decide how your product fairs in comparison with other options they might be considering. Example - "Use this process to triple your response rates" vs. "This feature helps with A/B testing to write better email copy."
5. Case Studies - Brands that Didn’t Sell and Still Made Profit
This isn’t just gyaan. Brands have started to realize the importance of ‘connecting’ with prospects versus ‘selling’. And it hasn’t just improved their brand value but also positively impacted their bottomline. Let’s look at some real-life examples that prove this.
5.1 How VenturePact Generated More than 11,000 Leads Using an Interactive Calculator? VenturePact build a mobile app calculator where a prospective customer could answer 8 questions about their app and get a cost estimate instantly.
This tool was interactive, could capture attention and provided instant gratification. Besides, it was less competitive in search, extremely share worthy (remember buzzfeed) and had all it took to go viral. Within weeks, statistics proved its efficacy.
This calculator added a lot of value upfront to customers, while showing phenomenal results for VenturePact. The calculator was used not only by VenturePact’s customers but also competitors’ customers to check whether they were paying a justified price. “ The calculator became a benchmark for development cost,” exclaims Pratham Mittal.
The calculator started with a simple yet highly converting landing page with a single Call To Action. The click through rate on this page was 66%. Yes, 66%.
This was followed by a series of 8 simple questions with multiple choice answers. It took an average of 159 seconds to run through the calculator.
Virality was inbuilt. It asked for not only your email but also email of people who you’d recommend the calculator to. The conversion on this form stood at a staggering 40%. Generally speaking, the conversion rate on an ebook landing page is approximately 0-12%.
And finally, the results with a clear onward call to action. Approximately 4% of users clicked on the CTA and went to the company website.
6. How to diagnose whether you're salesy?
As a salesperson or a marketer you may not realize when you cross the thin line between selling and pushing your product/service into the prospect’s face. Your best sales tactic may be the biggest ‘pain in the neck’ for your prospects. No! That can’t be true for me - if this is something you just thought, let’s give you a reality check.
We’ll talk about 5 signs that make you ‘too salesy’, and if even one of these rings a bell, go ahead and read ‘The Way Around’.
1. Your Sales Talk Starts and Ends with ‘We’, “Our Product”, “My Team” etc.
Your sales pitch makes all the difference. When it is a product that you wish to sell, it is obvious that you will talk about it. However, if your entire talk is about the product then you will lose out on the customer's’ interest. Does your talk include only the features of the product that you offer? You need to help the customer discover the fact that they need your product. Talking about benefits isn’t enough. You begin to get boring and appearing as someone desperate to
make a sales pitch. You don’t want to be ‘the David’ who called Jill Harrington to ‘help him generate leads for his business’ but had no clue about Jill’s business or the challenges he was facing.
The Way Around A talk focused on the product can be acceptable if it as a solution to the customer's problems. So make sure your pitch makes the customers feel that buying your product can make a difference in their lives. As a salesperson, you need to listen more and talk less to be successful. This not only helps you earn buyers’ trust, it also gives insights that you can use to personalize your messaging and recommend the right solution. In case you feel challenged to stay quiet during a sales call, here are few tricks you can use - Keep a note handy that reads W.A.I.T (Why Am I Talking). HubSpot sales rep Gary Valenti uses this technique too! You can also press the mute button once you’ve asked a question on a sales call. Also, ask one question at a time. This helps prospects process you question and give better insights, and gives you the time to modify your time of enquiry. Speaking less is tough but if you have an intent to listen, it isn’t as challenging.
2. You’re Agenda-Driven, Not Customer-Centric You are a pushy salesperson if your one-point agenda is to sell the product. There is no connection between you and the customers. You don’t want to add value to them. You keep sending them long email trails, entice them with free downloads or webinars, or point them to resources to read. But they still won’t convert. Why? Because none of this has been done with the customer in mind. Did you find out if the customer has time for your emails. Or if wants to read those lengthy resources?
The Way Around Sales is about being sensitive to the needs of the customer. Show a genuine interest in their requirements and try to solve their problems earnestly. Your product should be able to solve the problem that the customers are dealing with. If you really feel like creating resources, create meaningful ones. VenturePact, a SaaS platform, had to find a way to answer their prospects biggest question - how much does it cost to build a mobile app. Instead of pointing them to boring resources, they created a calculator. The tool got them more than 11K qualified leads.
3. Your Claims are, Well, Just Claims Salespeople are often accused of making big claims. Well, your job requires you to do so. After all, you have to make your product look better than competition. Thus, you use flamboyant presentations that include reviews and quotes from satisfied clients. However, none of this seems true to the customers and they
often waive off such baseless claims.
The Way Around Nothing works better than numbers and statistics to prove the success of the product. Include such data in your presentation because it can be verified. To gain the customers’ trust, use endorsements from public figures (influencers) instead of big words. There should be a proof of what you are saying. Take Starbucks for instance. Not that they need any advertising at this point in their journey, but stars moving around with a Starbucks cup in their hand re emphasizes the ‘cool’ factor of the brand.
Case studies, testimonials, and product reviews may come handy. Product reviews are 12-times more trusted than sales copy from manufacturers. Everything you say/show should be backed by a proof. Google Chrome’s ad promotes how fast it is. It says, 'even the fastest computers need 45 seconds to start and that is enough to make a sandwich!’
4. You’re Using Generic Pitches Nothing sounds more hollow than empty promises. If you have promised your customers that you will send them customized pitch, you better send them. A generic brochure cannot replace it and paints a poor picture. Stick to your one-track sales pitch and you will surely sound more ‘in your face’ than persuasive.
The Way Around Be proactive in your approach especially when making a sales pitch. If your client wishes some customized information, you cannot ignore it. According to a 2014 study by Qvidian, salespeople often lose deals because they haven’t customized their content to their buyer’s needs. You need to take that extra effort to collect the required data and send to him just what he wants.
5. Your Sales Call/Pitch Doesn’t Resemble a Story As a salesman, it is important to tell a story, one which the customers will relate to. Merely selling a product is not enough - especially where the future sales is in question. Stories, whether about the brand or the product or a customer who's used the product and felt the change, touch an emotional chord with people. When told like a story, customers can relate with the humane part.
The Way Around The sales pitch will work wonders if a story is woven in the narrative. Bru, for example, tells about the coffee grower who works relentlessly to ensure that the best coffee beans are delivered to the company. According to author Erik
Luhrs, “In sales situations, stories allow the subconscious mind of the prospect to truly ‘get’ and see the valuable application of the solution.”