The businesses and organizations that do the best job at marketing realize they’re not just selling products or services. They realize they must sell solutions.
These are the same companies that don’t wait for clients to find them. If you think clients are looking for you, peek out the front door. Chances are there’s not a line of hot prospects begging to buy from you.
Add longer sales cycles and more competition, a tougher-than-ever economy, and you know you need to deploy new strategies to help you stand out from the competition.
Whether it works for you or against you, clients and prospects know more than ever. In fact, some know more about your business and your products than you do. In addition, clients and prospects are busier than ever, and they are less patient.
What does this mean to you? Your prospects and clients would say to you, if they could look you right in the eye, “We want to know what is in it for us.” In other words, if it does not provide them with a solution, make money for them, or save them time today, they are uninterested.
How do you respond? You have to understand your clients better than ever. Although they may purchase identical products, they, themselves, are not the same. People buy for different reasons than they did in the past, too. In fact, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that convenience is more important than price.
In addition, you have to work harder to turn prospects into clients. The world has not seen a truly innovative mousetrap in a long time.
You must create the demand instead of just filling it. You need to be long and strong on insights into your client base, and light on order taking. The one thing you cannot do is waste anyone’s time. When prospects sense this, they are gone for good — standing in someone else’s line.
There is a positive side: When you focus on the needs of your clients and prospects and provide real-world, bottom-line solutions, you discover that people and organizations respond.
You may be pleasantly surprised to discover something else that happens when people and organizations see real value and real solutions. They make a mental buy-in that may even preclude the empty, low-price offers of your competitors.
This is why targeted marketing that promises solutions, entices your prospects, educates your clients helps you make the sale.
