1. the Art of Selling Without Being 'Salesy' How Do You Ask
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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. Source 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? Source 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. Source 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. Source 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. Source 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. Source 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. Source 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. Source 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.