Getting Your Buyers On The Journey

We would all like to put a product online and have website visitors rush to our site and buy everything we have. There are some companies that can do this, some products that literally fly off the shelves, but it’s rare.

Most buyers go through a predictable journey before they hit the buy button. Understanding it is the key to winning more business.

I’ve seen a number of buyer’s journey maps. They can differ based on the industry and the complexity of the product. Some, like commercial aircraft, have a very long sales cycle. Others, like footwear endorsed by professional athletes, don’t require as much coaxing.

The key is to find out what steps your buyer must go through before they are ready to buy from you. Then, it’s just a matter of providing the right content for each step in the buyer’s journey to keep them moving to the next one.

I like to use a 7-step buyer’s journey, but then I work with companies that sell complex product offerings with long sales cycles.

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Making Webinars Better Lead Magnets

Just a few years ago, I would have told you that a webinar was not a good way to get leads. The only way they worked was if you partnered with a major trade publisher that would promote the webinar to its list and in its publications. It was that promotion, more than anything else, that provided the value.

There were a couple of reasons for this. First, most webinars were just thinly veiled sales pitches. There often wasn’t a lot of value provided. It was like a live demo but with a slightly more difficult method of posing questions.

The second reason was that the video conferencing software of the day thought that smooth connectivity was its value proposition. In fairness, before widespread 5G, network speeds could be slow and there was nothing more annoying than watching a talking head sell you something you didn’t know why you would want and having it continuously freeze up.

The real value of video conferencing software isn’t about getting people together on a video call. It’s about providing the functionality of a television production studio on your desktop so someone can produce a show that’s worth tuning in for.

Today, that software exists and it includes a lot of great functionality that allows good producers to gamify the experience, attracting and keeping larger audiences engaged and helping company thought leaders build a following.

It’s still important to avoid selling the audience and to provide a great deal of value to your viewers, but a good producer can help you with that.

How Irresistible Is Your Offer?

You know what gets people to buy things? Good offers. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, it’s not going to move if your prospective buyer doesn’t see the value in your offer.

Creating an offer that can’t be refused is an art form and it requires you to know who you are addressing and what they want or need. If you know what they want and you have a good offer, that’s good. But if you know what they need and you have the best available offer, that’s better.

The mistake many business people make is that they focus all of their efforts on the actual offer without considering the prerequisites that must be in place before the prospect gets there.

Of the five sales you have to make to complete a transaction, three of them come before your irresistible offer for the solution you’re selling. They include:

• Selling yourself - do they trust you?
• Selling your company - are you known for delivering success?
• Selling why now is the time.

The other two sales, the price and the solution itself, are both bound up in your irresistible offer. You can create the best offer ever, but if you haven’t already made the three prerequisite sales, it won’t be perceived as valuable by your prospects.

So, how do you make those first three sales? By building a relationship with your prospect. Since almost no buyer wants to do that before they make their decision, you have to do it with content they can download on their own and study at their leisure.

The best piece of content for this is a well-written White Paper. It’s one of our favorite projects and we’ve built a decent reputation for our ability to draft papers that get prospects to take action. They work particularly well for complex products with long sales cycles. Plus, the way we write them, they come with more than 30 pieces of additional content for your marketing purposes.

We want to give a shoutout to some good friends who have released news during the past month, in case you missed it.

Mortgage Cadence Publishes White Paper For Tech Buyers Read article

Port workers are at war with automation. Can they win? Read article

How Mortgage Lenders Can Get More Insight From the Data They Already Own Read article

Market Like a Startup

Many of the readers of this newsletter run established businesses, but there is a lot to be gained by thinking like a startup. It’s not quite the “Beginner’s Mind” concept of the spiritual masters of the far east, but it can also pay high dividends.

When I run across an article about startup marketing on the cheap, I always check it out. Once our companies get large enough that we can start allocating funds to our marketing budgets, we can lose some of the scrappiness that the best entrepreneurs use to get their companies off the ground.

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I write this newsletter with the idea that any idea I include can be taken by anyone on your team and put to work for your benefit. I hope you’re finding ideas here each month that work for you and help you grow.

But sometimes, it’s helpful to reach out to an objective third party to help you generate content that will get you more attention. That’s what I do.

When you're ready for some help,

here are 3 reasons to call me:

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