Do you ever wonder why your B2B website isn’t getting more traffic? It could be that your website isn’t properly optimized for search engines.
It’s not news that sales is very much a communications experience, with language and words being two core building blocks of communication, and by extension your sales success. The words you select matter, and while it may be true in the school yard that “sticks and stones may break your bones, but words can never hurt you”, in sales they can kill you, and hurt you a lot as you experience said death.
In my previous post (Mind-control in Selling) I was talking about how selling is fundamentally a question of the influence of mind over mind, and how the formula for developing a mind control is very simple. It is a study of the five senses and the manner in which they influence the mind, and a constant effort to apply in practice what you have learned.
You have learned, in the early grades at school, that the five senses are sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. These five senses may be called the avenues to the mind. It is impossible for any sensation to reach the objective mind except through one of the five senses.
Sometimes I become a bit skeptical when I see the huge uptake in social media by B2B marketers. In fact, recent research by Junta42 and Marketing Profs finds that use of social media is the top B2B tactic in use as identified by 79% of 985 marketers. Unfortunately, only 31% of those marketers said they found it effective. Read more at...http://www.soldlab.com/news/2011/9/29/the-biggest-question-when-using-b2b-social-media-to.html
There are, of course, many reasons why people buy from you, but they all tend to fit into specific categories and if you are able to observe and ascertain the real reason why your prospect says ‘yes’ to you, then you have a good platform to build on for the next prospect.
So what are the main reasons why buyers make decisions to buy? Here are four:
We all know how frustrating it is when a sales opportunity we’ve been working on suddenly stalls out. Our instinctive response is to begin thinking of ways to accelerate the prospect’s decision about the sale, usually by offering some financial incentive (a discount). Paradoxically, this often has the opposite effect. The prospect senses your eagerness, which may be perceived as desperation, making you less attractive, and causing a further delay in purchasing your product or service. Is there a better way?
If we are to believe everything on the TV, radio and paper, Chicken Little would be having a field day! Yep the sky is falling and we are all in trouble!
Or are we? In the past recessions more new business were developed than in the up period that preceded the recessions!
Obviously there must be opportunity in a down market?
The telephone is your lifeline to sales.
Technology comes and goes but the phone will likely be your lifeline to revenue for decades to come. If the phone is one of our primary modes of engaging the marketplace, why do so many sales professionals perform so poorly on this stage?
Selling is about connecting and engaging with the other party. Your sales quota may be stressful, but there’s rarely gain in exposing that to your prospect.