A common mistake marketers make is believing that their product or service is so exceptional and superior that everyone needs it.
Generally, every company seeks prospects or potential buyers who may not be the right segment for our product. They simply decide not to buy from us because they do not need the service in the way we thought they would.
This common mistake is due, among others, to:
- We fall in love with the product or service we sell.
- We are so concerned about selling that we try to offer it to those who do not need it. It is common to say "He is selling ice to the Eskimos."
To avoid this, we have to be very specific about who can and cannot be our customers.
The first thing you have to do is know your product, what characteristics it has, and what circumstances make it functional. If you are left with only that, you will only have an mechanical element and that appeals very little to a person or company's selling or buying capacity.
Once you know the characteristics of your product, you can know what kind of problems it solves for your clients.
It is important to find a solution to a problem, and if I as a company am able to identify that your product solves my problem, then we are on the right track.
You have to be very clear about what kind of problems your product or service solves and you have to be able to see beyond the obvious problem, for example, "a company that has no idea how large is the shrinkage in its production" the real problem is that it is worried about the money it is losing or not earning because it does not understand how much the shrinkage represents. In this case, what you will solve for your prospect or client is how to know in detail how much money these losses are costing them through your system, software, or what you are trying to sell them so that when we look for new clients, we must know who is having the problem.
The first thing we need to look at is our compatibility with our prospect or customer. For example: "I am 50 years old, so I think it is easier to communicate with a person between 35 and 65 years old because of very simple things because we have shared histories, we have the same problems" if I approach a much younger person, it will be harder to understand each other. If you are an engineer, it will be easier to communicate with a colleague, a graduate, etc.
To solve a problem, you have to determine whether the prospect sees it as such. People won't solve something we don't see, and we must recognize the problem in order to resolve it. Once you identify the need of your prospects, you can offer your product. That way you know who has the potential to convert them into a customer.
The sales race is not a competition. It is not about who sells to the toughest customer. Your job is to properly promote and market your company's services or products, not to win over the highest bidder. Focus on features and you will find plenty of markets to serve.
If you have been in the sales industry for more than 3 years, you are no longer a novice salesperson. You will know that objectively analyzing your customer base will help you a lot. The question is who are your most valuable customers and what characteristics do they share?
It's not about polling your customers about their sporting preferences. Instead, it's about finding the common denominator that identifies them as similar.
Success is very simple if your most valuable customers share those characteristics. Once you discover those characteristics about them, your search structure is simplified and you can approach new prospects or customers.
This is a desk job. A successful marketer analyzes the information his customers pass on to him that he overlooked. The intention is to identify communities, matches, and new business opportunities and identify precisely those elements that make your customer a customer.
Focus on analyzing the market you serve, so that it is much easier to identify who your customers might be and focus your efforts on that. This is a career that must last for many years. The key is to be very clear about who your customer is and the problem you can solve with your product or service.
Upnify´s Editorial Team; formed by professionals and experts in Marketing, Sales, Communication, Design and other areas. They share their experience through articles enriching the commercial culture.