Go Fish! Turning Blah Blah Blah into Bling
Share
Convincing people to buy from you is sort of like fishing. To catch those fish you need a product or service that someone else needs, a process you work consistently, a hook with the right kind of bait, patience and great timing. When it gets right down to it, your ability to attract clients and close sales is not that much different.

Ditch the pitch.

If you stop and think about it for a minute, it’s pretty obvious that Mr. or Ms. Fish isn’t likely to swim right up to you and jump on that hook the moment you throw it in the water. Why then would you expect your potential client to pry open their wallet the moment you throw something at them? Call me old fashioned, but I do believe that you don’t get a second chance to make a great first impression. The quality of that first interaction, whether it is email, the phone or a social media conversation, matters.

And that’s the problem.

Blah Blah Blah

Salespeople and marketers continue to complain that decision makers are harder to reach. It’s true, they are. There is a reason why less than 10% of those emails and phone calls are ignored. Sellers and marketers are have themselves to blame. Don’t think so? In a Digital Marketing Digest released by Silverpop, they say that “Buyers, fed up with crowded inboxes and irrelevant advertising noise, are shutting out content that isn’t relevant to them and using search and social to control their own buyer journeys.”

Though I am a huge proponent of using social media as part of your sales game plan, I also don’t believe that email and email marketing is going away any time soon. To stand out, your message must be relevant to the person you are sending it too.

It is NOT about you.

Most sales messages (AKA sales spam) that I see or receive are overly “me” centric. It’s all about the company, the product or that last infusion of cash they received from a major investor. These messages are focused on your sales agenda when it should focus on the buyers agenda. If you don’t communicate your message from the buyers point of view, you lose. Buyers want answers to their business problems. If you can show them that you solve those problems, you have a shot at a customer for life. But a word of caution… when I say, “show them how you solve their problem”, I do not mean rolling into your pitch and demo.

Your potential customers do not care about the process of how you get things done. Nor do they really care about the technical details, at least not at the beginning of their decision making journey. Of course, at some point the technical details, or the process of how you get things done will matter, but that isn’t what you lead with in your early stage sales conversations. What buyers care about is the actual RESULT they receive when they buy from you. Demonstrate that you’ve done your homework, understand their business and the competitive challenges they are likely facing. Show them how, working together, you not only are positioned to help solve business problems, but that you can help them create an adoption roadmap that will ensure the success of their purchase and deliver the return on their investment.

Message matters.

In more ways than one. Whether you know it or not, the random, pitchy emails you are sending are either uplifting your brand or slowly killing it over time. If expanded networks (with the right targeted buyer) and more leads in the pipeline is the goal, now would be a good time to do a complete overhaul of the sales message strategy you are using.

Forget the process and all the jargon. Talk about the problems you solve and the tangible results you deliver. That’s how you turn blah blah blah into BLING!