The Sales Formula

In an online article at www.marketingweek.co.uk entitled ‘Young marketers need to focus on basics to succeed’ there was an interesting quote from Claire Harrison-Church, former Sainsbury’s director of brand communication.

“It’s important that marketers are externally focused. So many people in the business get swamped about running the business in which they are involved that they can miss that the consumer has moved on and is busy doing something else”

Focusing on truly understanding your customer is something that I continually talk about in my blog but it amazes me that not only do business owners need to be reminded of this but also marketers. Every marketing initiative needs to start with the question – what will it deliver to the customer or prospect?

Let’s talk about brochures.

The Daily Telegraph distributed an independent report from Lyonsdown on the print industry this month. Fascinating stuff but the piece I want to talk about is a survey they carried out on marketing and sales printed collateral and in particularly brochures. 54% of the UK companies surveyed (123 companies participated) use brochures as a sales tools but many were not happy with the performance this piece of collateral delivered.

I believe this is because many companies when designing their marketing collateral don’t actually think through how each piece is going to be used. They might spend a lot of money, time and effort coming up with a concept, getting the piece designed and printed without understanding how they are going to recoup their investment.

Whenever I carry out a competitive analysis project for a client I am surprised that the client asks me to concentrate on service offerings, functionality and pricing (all important) but rarely mentions the customer experience during the sales cycle. But the customer experience can be the one thing that tips the scales in the buying decision and that is why the ‘Mystery Shopping’ angle of looking at your competitors and your own company is so important.

If you have lost to a competitor when you know your product and service is better or if not at least equal to the company that won the business then you need to do some investigation with the following things in mind.

An interview with Carey Smith from Growing Business Videos who specialize in producing sales and marketing videos for clients of all sizes and across industry sectors designed to help increase sales.

Before we talk about the medium of video why do you think it is important to use customers as a sales and marketing tool?

The two main things that existing customers bring to the sales cycle is credibility and reassurance – they have experienced the reality of being a customer. An analogy I often use is booking hotels – we are all use to looking up a hotel on Trip Advisor to read customer reviews before we decide on where to stay and the further the product and service you are considering is away from a commodity the more you need to rely on references.

So why video?

The problem is people don’t necessarily believe the words they read on the internet and they also heavily discount what a company says about themselves. The power of video comes from its ability to transmit emotional messages such as credibility, honesty and trust which for a business is kind of like gold dust.

Gold dust?

When I was selling a software solution some time back I had a customer who used to turn up at our stand at exhibitions and other events on a regular basis and start giving demos to prospects. We never arranged for him to be there but were delighted to see him and as he grabbed the mouse to start his version of a sales demo I would grab a cup of coffee and let him take over simply because whatever he said would be accepted without question whereas I as a sales person had to work harder to win the confidence of a new prospect. This only worked because he was extremely happy with our products and service in fact he was passionate about it and this belief in our solution showed in his demeanor and as a result he along with a selected group of other customers became our best selling tool.