Be Relevant or Be Deleted: Six Ways to Sell Value

What do prospects really care about? Not your product or service (at least, not right away). Primarily, they care about their own problems. Packaging and delivering useful information throughout the buying process earns you the role of trusted advisor – and one with whom prospects will want to do business. So how can you achieve this? Here are six recommendations:

1. 1. Make sense of information overload. Buyers find massive amounts of information online and form opinions before they even think about talking to you. That means you must provide relevant content, keep it up-to-date, and link to customer pain points. Don’t just send the 20-page e-book; call out a few points that you think are the most relevant to a specific customer.
   2. Be a first responder. Buyers are elusive. If only you had a GPS to track their whereabouts along the sales cycle and in their thinking. Leverage marketing automation and sales enablement technology to gain insight into what type of content interests your buyers and when you have their attention. These indicators increase the likelihood of your being in the right place at the right time to take desired action.
   3. Disrupt thinking. Buyers can be myopic. Your job is to show them a new perspective. It may seem counterintuitive, but success requires giving buyers a novel and unique outlook about how to solve their problems. Provide illustrations to support the alternate approach. Case studies, research, analyst reports, white papers, articles, and other relevant content strengthen your point of view.
   4. Respect the inbox. Buyers are buried beneath an avalanche of emails. With all of the talk about social media, it’s easy to overlook the fact that email is still the go-to communication method for businesspeople. Don’t waste buyers’ time making them search their email to find that one needed item you sent yesterday – or was it a month ago? Imagine the benefit of making all of the value-added information you provide accessible from one easy-to-find location. There are tools and resources available that provide this. Think of it as one-stop shopping.
   5. Streamline for sharing. Selling today requires convincing more people – even unknown ones – in less time. You must persuade more decision makers, and at the same time you’re under pressure to shorten the sales cycle. Equip buyers with the tools they need to sell on your behalf to key influencers in the decision-making process. Help them gain internal support by packaging your expertise in a way that makes it effortless for them to distribute and for influencers to consume. A tacit endorsement from a colleague is often the strongest one.
   6. Put the “person” in “personalized.” Getting a buyer to connect to what you have to offer requires that you provide a variety of assets in a variety of formats. IDG Enterprise reports that decision makers need five pieces of “content” before they are ready to speak to a sales rep. Sometimes a buyer prefers video. Sometimes the choice is an in-depth research report. Other times, quick-read PowerPoint slides do the trick. Provide a variety of content pieces that your company creates, as well as content from respected third parties.

By taking these considerations into account – providing guidance, sharing relevant and easily digestible content, and helping to make buyers’ jobs easier – you will be well positioned to be the vendor of choice.