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Articles filed in: Marketing
What Do The Best Salespeople Do?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
A young couple spent a while ‘just looking’ in the furniture store before approaching a salesperson to ask about fabric choices on a particular sofa. She showed them the swatches and said nothing. The guy asked if they had anything like it—a large squashy four-seater in leather. They didn’t.
“What size exactly are you looking for?” she asked.
The couple didn’t know, but they started to describe the style of sofa they wanted.
Comfortable, not too formal.
“Come back to us once you have your measurements.” she smiled, as they walked out the door.
The salesperson didn’t ask, where they lived, in what type of house. She forgot to find out where the sofa would go, what they would mostly use it for and the number of people in their family. She lost the business because she prioritised the facts before the story. This doesn’t happen at IKEA.
Yes, the sofa has to fit in the room physically, but it has to fit with the customer’s wants, needs, hopes and dreams first. The best salespeople always start with the story.
The First Rule Of Standing Out
If you want to stand out, do the thing that’s in short supply.
When everyone is fighting for attention, be the one who earns permission.
When everyone is looking for an angle, be the one who acts with integrity.
When everyone is chasing growth, be the one who deepens connection.
When everyone seeks scale, be the one who values loyalty.
When everyone takes shortcuts, be the one who cares.
The thing that’s scarce right now is sincerity in one form or another. We’re tired of tactics that manipulate as a means to someone else’s end. In the end we win by being the exception to the rule.
Image by Thomas Hawk
Is Your Business Reacting Or Responding?
It was impossible to walk down any high street in June without running into a notice informing you fidget spinners were BACK IN STOCK. The fidget spinner was clearly ‘the thing’ of the moment. A month later we’re already beginning to witness its decline. Another fad bites the dust.
A fad by definition is transient. It’s success hinges on what people are talking about today and is not backed by a genuine need that will require to be fulfilled tomorrow. It takes effort and courage to respond to everyday needs instead of following the crowd that’s reacting to what’s top of mind. It’s impossible to do both—which is why a good business strategy is always intentional.
Is your business reacting to the fickle market or responding to a customer’s unmet needs?
Image by Mario Adalid
What’s Your Failure Strategy?
filed in Marketing, Strategy, Success
Everything runs like clockwork when all staff members show up for the hectic Sunday morning shift at the cafe. Customers are greeted at the door, informed about delays and offered a drink while they wait for a table. The whole system falls apart when one team member calls in sick. Waitstaff double as greeters and coffee runners. People forget to prioritise, service is compromised, and customers get disgruntled.
Every business has a success strategy. We set targets and create plans to achieve them. We imagine how we will perform and serve customers on our best days when staff show up on time and everything is going according to plan. It’s much harder to plan for failure. We don’t devote the same time and resources to imagining our next move for those times when we have to deviate from our original plan. We’re unprepared for failure because we don’t always think about what could go wrong and what we will do when it does.
The server might crash.
The package may get lost.
The email might offend.
The salesperson could have a bad day.
The marketing campaign might not perform as you hoped.
What then?
The difference between an exceptional performer and an average one is that they prepare for their ‘off’ days. It turns out that we do our best work when we plan for failure and success in equal measure.
Image by Garry Knight
Noticed Vs. Remembered
filed in Marketing, Strategy, Success
For every ten things we do today to get noticed we will do one thing worthy of being remembered. The irony, of course, is what we want deep down is to do work that’s remembered—not just noticed. We only achieve that goal by redressing this imbalance—forsaking the desire for attention today, to double down on doing something that will still matter tomorrow.
Image by Ant
The Transformation Business
When a woman wears heels her posture shifts. How she moves and carries herself changes—not just because of the physics and her altered centre of gravity, but often because of how wearing the heels makes her feel. Both her gait and her behaviour are transformed. Similarly, once the coffee drinker pays $4 for a cup of barista coffee, he’s unlikely to see the value in the $1 cup available at the corner deli. His behaviour reinforces the story he tells himself. He makes new assumptions about quality and price. His worldview changes.
We have a limiting belief about commerce, which is commonly viewed as a series of transactional exchanges. The truth is sales and marketing are less about oiling the wheels of transactions, and much more about enabling behaviour change than we realise.
As entrepreneurs and business leaders, we’re in the transformation business. If we’re doing a good job, we’re not simply convincing people to part with money in exchange for goods and services—we’re enabling them to make sometimes imperceptible shifts in their posture. Our role is to help customers take steps towards the change they’re seeking.
Where does your customer want to go next? Who does she want to be when she gets there?
Image by Rawle C. Jackman
Four Stories Every Business Needs
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Every marketer knows he needs to tell his customers a story about what he’s creating—one he hopes will help them buy into his idea or buy his product.
The second story is that of his existing customer and her relationship with his product or service. The best business leaders reflect on how using their product impacts customers’ lives and look for opportunities to engage, improve and build loyalty.
The third story it’s important to understand is that of the next customer he hopes to serve—her challenges, hopes, dreams and worldviews.
The fourth, and most overlooked is the story of the customer he shouldn’t serve. The potential customer who falls into his target demographic, but who doesn’t share his company’s values or is unlikely to be the kind of client who will enable him to do his best work.
Many businesses devote a disproportionate amount of time trying to woo and please people who will never become their ideal customers. It stands to reason that it’s better to devote the bulk of your resources to those you really want to matter to. And yet, we often fall into the trap of structuring our businesses to placate the naysayers instead of doubling down on delighting the believers. It pays to know which is which.
Mean It Like You Say It
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The Sunday ice-cream scooper at the gelato place on Spring Street makes new customers sample every flavour before they buy anything. She knows her gelato inside and out. Her enthusiasm is infectious. She reels off the most popular flavours and tells stories about how pistachio lovers always return to pistachio having tried everything else because it’s that good. Sunday scooper believes in her product. She may only work one day a week in the lowliest position in the company but training her to love the gelato is the best investment the boss has ever made.
Far too often we fail to think deeply about and celebrate what differentiates us from others, and so we flounder when it comes to articulating our value. If we’re telling a story we believe in, it shows. There is no better marketing strategy.
When you say it, do you mean it?
Imange by Alpha.
The Incremental Advantage
filed in Marketing, News, Storytelling, Strategy
Despite what we know about how distracted our customers can be and how endless their choices are, when it comes to our messaging and marketing, we often overestimate our ability to cut through. You only have to spend five minutes watching someone scrolling through a feed on their smartphone (try it), or see how the guy reading a newspaper at your local cafe bypasses most of the content to get to the parts that interest him, for the reality we’re facing to sink in.
Instead of framing this as a challenge see it as an opportunity. Great innovators, committed business owners and unselfish marketers can thrive by planning to engage more deeply with their audience over time. The promise of the digital marketing era was that it would be faster and cheaper to reach more people. That promise didn’t guarantee deeper engagement, loyalty and more sales.
Now more than ever, even in a fast-paced digital world there is no time for marketing emergencies. We still make progress in increments.
Image by Jeroen Looyé.
The First Law Of Good Marketing
We can tie ourselves up in knots wondering and worrying about how to communicate our value to prospective customers. Which marketing tactics should we use? How can we improve our product descriptions? What’s the best strategy for converting leads to sales? How can we ‘get more eyeballs’ on our content? While these are all valid questions, the best marketing happens when we flip our ‘more eyeballs’ obsession on its head.
The first law of good marketing is to show people that you see them, instead of constantly trying to make them see you.
Women’s shapewear that reduces visible panty lines and unsightly bulges says. ‘I see you’.
Good quality razors at a fair price say, ‘I see you’.
The ‘skip intro’ button on your favourite show says, ‘I see you’.
One-click ordering says, ‘I see you’.
You become a more insightful innovator as well as a better marketer when you can show customers that seeing and hearing them is your number one priority. How are you letting your customers know that you see them?
Image by Ana Fuentes.