Persuading people to make different buying decisions can be a difficult process but the benefits can be enormous…if you fail to change minds so that buyers consider quality alongside the cost of your goods or services then you’ll be locked into a downward spiral of ever decreasing profits.

By now you should have completed steps 1 to 3 from my last post…you’ll have worked with your partner to explore what makes you worth listening to. Then you’ll have widened your discussion to involve others and produced a load of ideas on post-it notes about topics you think your clients might be interested in, or that you think are affecting them now or might do so in the future.

Great! But what you have are a lot of random ideas that aren’t organised into any real way that will get your clients to think differently…so, lets do Step 4. The first thing to remember is that…

this isn’t about you but about persuading your clients to think differently in your market when they want to buy your goods or services.
Take some pages from a flip chart and mark them separately along the top as ‘demand’ and ‘goods/ services’. Now go through your post-its and move them either onto the ‘demand’ or the ‘goods/ services’ page. The ‘demand’ needs to be what your client needs or what they want to hear, whilst the goods/ services page needs to be what you want to sell.

Step 5 is the really interesting part when it all comes together and you can start to think about how you are really going to change the thinking in your market.

Like many of you I am inundated with people trying to sell things that they want to sell but that I don’t want to buy…at least not at the time when they want to sell them. And that’s because either I’m not ready or I haven’t thought about it before or I just don’t know that it will be useful to me yet. For the seller to keep pushing at that door is wasting time and effort because it is never going to open.

The way you can sell better is to align your messages with the things your buyer wants to fix or wants to hear or wants to find out about. So, take each post-it from your ‘goods/ services’ list and look on your ‘demand’ list for something that is connected…there may be a few so you might need to duplicate your post-its or connect a few of them together.

By the end of this you should have one page of post-its with things your client wants to know about with the corresponding things you have that will provide the answer(s).

Now, I’ve just finished a two-day workshop working with people from an infrastructure contracting company who want to develop their product across the Middle East, Southern Europe and North Africa market. We followed exactly this process although it was a bit more involved as we had to assess the demand for services they want to sell into 10 countries (and their neighbours!) but we ended up with a mini business plan. Of course, that isn’t everything and they now have some actions they need to take, information they need to gather and figures they need to assemble before their board can consider and, hopefully, approve their growth plans…but they now have a definite plan of action!

When you’ve finished Step 5 you will also have a plan that is starting to emerge that you’ll need to develop into Step 6, which is all about connecting with your audience in the way they want.

You know what your audience wants to hear (the ‘demand’) and you know that you know what you’re talking about…check back to Step 2 if you’re not sure. So all you have to do is to start writing your first post (or blog, if you prefer) that will inform your audience of what they want to know about.

Be sure to address more about their issues or needs but weave into your tale stories about how you’ve solved similar things or dealt with issues in a way that helped a client achieve their objective better, cheaper, easier…this is more persuasive and is a powerful tool when you want to change how your audience thinks.

Now all you need to do is keep sending those posts to your audience frequently and through a variety of media. Keep building your audience with great information that addresses their issues and shows how you’ve fixed it for others…who wouldn’t want to hear from you and talk with you about fixing a similar issue?

Top Tip
Don’t delay…work through steps 4 to 6 to develop your ‘engagement plan’ from the jumble of ideas that you developed in Step 3 and start writing and connecting with your audience today!

Digital Marketing Solution
Our Digital Marketing Solution will help you to connect and ‘speak’ with thousands of your potential customers every week and I’m excited to see the results of our trial.

If you want to learn more just drop me a line and let’s talk about how you can turn Step 6 into your powerful communication tool to change the way your market buys your goods or services.

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