It used to be that if you got into a sales conversation with a prospect, your competition might consist of a few competitors, mostly local. Sometimes you might even get lucky and be the only one pitching the person. If you could make a good impression in your pitch, you were most likely going to be able to get the deal.
With the enormous amount of information available today on the internet, you may deliver a killer sales pitch which absolutely closes the prospect on your service or product. Then, having decided to buy, they look on the internet at competitors around the globe to make sure that they are going with the cheapest possible vendor for that same service or product.
What can you do to help make sure this doesn’t happen? What are your options other than driving your prices down to the point where you barely break even?
Luckily, with all of the information that people are able to research on companies, products and services, it can actually be a bit overwhelming to a potential buyer.
Especially if your product or service is hard to understand or technical, there is an approach that is very effective in winning business in today’s world.
Be the best communicator.
Communication is the key.
I have worked with thousands of business owners and talked with them about the challenges involved in really communicating what they do to potential customers.
I found that they almost all struggle to communicate quickly and easily to new prospects what it is that they do and why someone should do business with them.
One strategy that has proven very successful has been to create multiple blogs, pdfs, videos or brochures that easily and swiftly explain a particular point about their service or product, or really any piece of information needed in the buying process.
Then when you are engaging a prospect and they have a question, you can simply send them the document or video and answer their question immediately. If you can respond swiftly to every inquiry and ensure that you are always ready with an easy to understand answer in the form of written or visual content, you will stand head and shoulders above the competition who may have lower prices, but also have unclear deliverables, terms of service and hard to understand salespeople.
In a study by Forrester done into what drives the decision making process when choosing a vendor to go with, it was discovered that 82% of customers surveyed had viewed five or more pieces of content from the winning vendor before making a purchase.
Add that to the fact that in another study it was found that businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads and you start to get the idea that figuring out how to continually communicate to your prospects can be the key to unlocking the business expansion you’re looking for.
The purpose of Studio98 is “To help companies grow sales and profit through marketing, software and consulting”.
I hope you are able to use the information in this article to help you in your journey to run an expanding and profitable business.
Michael Figueroa
CEO Studio98
If you need any assistance in implementing the above ideas, even if you just need to talk it over with someone, give us a call, we’d be happy to help in any way we can.
