Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter what buyers think about you or your brand, if they don’t think about you or your brand. It doesn’t matter how much better you think you are than your competitors, and it certainly doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are about your own business and products. So the question remains, how DO you get buyers interested in your brand? The answer – you don’t.
In this blog, Hugh explains why you need to get buyers interested in a conversation, rather than in your brand. Earning the right to help your buyers with their challenges is paramount. He also outlines a number of tactics you can implement to help enable this privilege.
You’re fascinated with your business, with your products and services and why your products and services are so much better than your competitors and your buyers just don’t care. Frankly, this is dead easy. How do we create interest in our company? We don’t. They’re not interested in you. What they’re interested in is the problem that you can solve and in finding solutions to get it solved. That’s where their interest lies and therefore the conversation isn’t how do we get them interested in us? But, how do we get them interested in a conversation about that problem so that we can shape their thinking on how it would be solved?
Today, I’m going to show you tactics for getting the right buyers interested in a conversation along those lines. Clearly at some point in the buyer’s journey, they are going to want to look at our products and services and asses them. But, before that they’re going to think really hard about what it is they need at all from you or from anybody else and before that, they’re going to accept that they have a problem that they ought to fix at all in some fashion. Before that they might be interested in a conversation, but really not that troubled and before that they might know who you are but really just don’t care.
So how do you get them positioned and interested in you and your products? Again, you don’t. You don’t get them interested in a company, you get them interested in a conversation about the problem that they need to have solved and how they might think about getting it solved. I’m going to show you in a moment how we do that tactically, and a couple of suggested tactics for getting them interested in that conversation and how we can tell whether or not they are interested. I’m going to show you how we do that in a funnel plan, but before we do that I’m going to do two things: firstly I will show you how what kind of tactics work to getting business buyers interested in our conversation and I’ll invite you to receive more blogs like this.
Let’s get to those Interest Established tactics now first though. Because we’re not trying to get buyers interested in us, but in the conversation, it’s the conversation towards getting troubled. So what we do to work out whether they’re interested is we try to get them troubled and then watch how they react and which of them react to that troubling attempt. So we might be using tactics like direct mail and electronic direct mail to invite them, or even telemarketing to invite them to a troubling tactic. So if they register or if they click, then that’s Interest Established tactic. So it’s not about trying on its own to get them interested, it’s simply watching whether they are as we try to get them troubled, again, not about the product or even about the company but about the insight into the problem. So our troubling tactic is about the problem that’s going to be a webinar it’s going to be a seminar, it’s going to be a white paper, it’s going to be a video – any of those tactics are good troubling tactics. Then the positioning piece will be the direct mail, electronic mail or telemarketing. Perhaps it leads to that troubling tactic. Interest Established is simply, they clicked, they responded, they RSVP’d, they accepted our outbound phone call. That’s one.
Second approach is to listen. We’re going to listen through search and through social monitoring but also through social research. What are our targets, particularly our strategic targets – what are they saying? And join in their conversations and be a part of their dialogue and their journey.
I’ve got a third tactic for you. We call it video VBRs and I’ll explain it very briefly. I’ve got a blog on how to do this and why to do this. But in short now, its outbound video directly from a sales person to a prospect that they’ve not yet met. It’s only going to be used for my strategic targets and its going to be a personalised video that says “Hey I’ve been looking a little at your company, I’ve learned these things and it seems to me that” – then we lead to a discussion about the problem. When we do that we like to use a thing called Post Wire. The reason we use Post Wire is let me give you three reasons.
Firstly, it lets the sales person customize a landing page just for that company. Clearly communicates that we’re treating them as a strategic target. Secondly, it gives us the tracking when the person consumes the video or they slide share or whatever the tactic is that they’re consuming, there’s an email sent right to the sales person inbox and they can respond immediately. Thirdly, it lets marketing curate or even set up if you like those assets to make them easier for sales to use. So there’s a few approaches there you can use to establish interest with the right market.
Here’s how we do it in funnel plan. So in our last blog we added inbound and outbound tactics for positioning. So this time we really just want to see how they’ve reacted or who has reacted or frankly both. Who has reacted and how did they react? So I’m going to make one of our positioning tactics – the outbound video VBR that I spoke of and then the other Interest Established tactics are simply receiving a positive reaction to those positioning tactics. So let’s put a couple monitoring tactics in there in the Interest Established stage and simply the buyer’s positive reaction to our invitation troubling tactic is the Interest Established.
So I’ve labored it a little bit but clearly the point I want to make is that you’re not trying to get them interested in you. You’re trying to get them interested in a conversation about them and about their problem. That’s what Interest Established really means. So in the end how we get them interested is pretty simple. How we get the troubled? That’s a little more complex and I’ll show you how we do that on another day.
Well if you’ve enjoyed this blog then likely you’d enjoy others. Or maybe you’ve got a colleague who would also enjoy these blogs. If you haven’t already go to align.me/blog and you can subscribe there. There are a couple of options. There’s a twice a week blog which comes out nice a fresh or there’s a monthly blog called Funnel Vision Monthly and that’s got all of our very best blogs from the month. You can also go to YouTube and subscribe to our channel. If you have already but you have a colleague who hasn’t then maybe you could invite them now to join.
But for now, may your funnel be full and always flowing.
