We are all in the business of sales. Whether you’re looking to grow your customer base, sell more products, increase patient load, or generate some new leads, sales plays a huge role. And whether it’s through strategic marketing plans, public relations, social media, or advertising, how you sell yourself and your company truly matters. There are some sales strategies that you can implement no matter what marketing avenue you travel down. Here are our top five things that you should be considering when putting together your sales pitch.
The Problem
The first thing that you should consider, whether you’re working with a marketing agency or going it alone, is what the customer’s, or client’s, problem is. What do they need help with? What services or products can you provide to help them? Start by writing down the target audience or specific client and what they’re ‘problem’ is. Do they need better medical advice, a higher quality product, or perhaps a life change? After writing down the problem, consider the services that you can provide to offer the solution.
The Solution
What you’re selling is a solution to a buyer’s, or client’s, problem. That problem could be a small as needing the right cooking supplies to create an at-home masterpiece for dinner, or it could be as large as diagnosing a patient’s illness. We’re all experts in our own right, and thus we all have the knowledge and proficiency to assist clients and customers with certain problems. However, we know that we’re the best at what we do, our clients can attain to that, but presenting that solution to a customer’s problem is the key to successful sales.
If you think of sales as presenting the solution, the only solution, to a customer’s problem, your sales pitch will come across less ‘salesy’ and more helpful.
Motivation
What will motivate a customer to use your solution over another’s? Knowing your customer’s needs and wants, as well as the problems that they need assistance with, can help you to understand their overall motivations when purchasing products. Market research can greatly assist in this understanding. At Quaintise, our Scottsdale marketing firm implements many techniques to help business owners recognize what motivates their target audience to purchase certain brands.
Inspiration
Once you have the problem, the solution, and you understand the customer’s motivation behind certain purchases, you can begin to find your idea inspiration. This is the time consuming step, mainly because you never know when a wonderful idea will strike. Don’t rush this step, give it time and be willing to set it on a shelf for a few days to take your mind off of the matter. Presenting the solution in a helpful and effective manner involves a great deal of creativity and timing. As we’ve talked about before, always have a journal or notebook handy for when inspiration strikes, and write down absolutely everything, even if you think the idea is too over-the-top or not good enough.
The Sale
While in college I took a set of classes on Interdisciplinary Studies. The courses aimed to instruct students on the importance of understanding problems as opportunities. A solution was never the issue, it was understanding the problem so intricately, so perfectly, that the solution was the easy part. The Sale is very similar to those classes, because when you are able to perfectly understand the problem, the solution creates itself. By creating an opportunity to study and understand the problem completely, you can provide solutions and assistance far more targeted and effective than any of your competition.