What Else Do You Need To Get Customers To Buy?
Sales is a baffling art to most people. And it should be – everyone on the planet is more complex than they get credit for. Getting face-to-face with a qualified prospect is a challenge. Getting a person sufficiently motivated to give you money is incredibly difficult.
Customers need to be given credit – they are continually evolving. What used to work no longer works and needs to be reinvented.
Anyway, before you can even begin sell your wares there are three questions your prospect will ask themselves. Ignore them before you’ll ever be success at selling and by extension marketing. Here are the three questions:
How Well Do I Know You? – Your prospect asks themself this about any seller. It is their way of gauging how trustworthy you are.
If they feel they know you really well they will be easier to sell to them than if they don’t know you from a bar of soap. This is why many guru’s go to great lengths to be in the media – media breeds familiarity. Do you reckon David Koch has too much trouble getting business owners to follow his business advice?
No. Cos they see him on TV all the time – he is well known to his audience.
Do I like You?
At the same time your potential customers wonder about how well they know you. They are also deciding if they like you. This happens really quickly – first impressions matter. (As a few of us no doubt remember from our days doing direct sales.) Even if it was to get a date – you were still being judged based on first impressions.
The same thing happens when you send a direct mail piece – first impression of the piece and what you say, either will help you or hinder you.
Obviously it is much easier to sell to someone who already likes you.
Can I trust you?
These are less than trusting times. The late Stephen Covey (7 Habits Of Highly Effective People) spent a great deal of his later years looking at the effect trust on business relationships. Covey devised his own ways to measure trust.
When he found that trust was high – the speed and ease of doing business was much higher than if trust is low.
Trust is also a barrier to getting the first sale in the door. So be sure to do everything you can to engender trust before you ever ask for the order – and don’t do anything to jeopardise trust because it is hard to get back once it is lost.
I can tell you from experience that when a client knows, likes and trusts you – there is a much better client relationship to be had.