Help Your Customer Achieve Their Goals

Each time you make contact with a potential client, think of what you can do to help them achieve their goals. Hard selling tactics do nothing to build your prospect’s level of trust. With the Web, people have the ability to control what they view and which marketing messages they choose to engage.

Demonstrating how your products can help meet your prospect’s goals may require you alter your current core marketing message. Stop focusing on selling and start thinking of how you might educate your prospects. This can be done by offering free downloadable product guides, tips sheets, problem-solving case studies, and periodic newsletters.

What’s wrong with placing the focus on selling? Absolutely nothing! As a business owner, your ultimate goal is to sell. But you can’t sell unless you first warm up the prospect by showing them directly how they will benefit from your offering. If you want to meet your business goals, you simply MUST focus on your customer’s goals first.

It’s Not the Features, It’s the Benefits

One big mistake is to talk about your product’s features as opposed to the benefits. When talking with prospects or creating your marketing brochures, make sure you bullet point the benefits of the product right at the very beginning. Show them how your product or service will solve their pressing problems.

Give Away Free Helpful Items

One of the best preselling strategies is to simply give away relevant and compelling information that helps your prospects solve a difficult business issue. Think of what you can create to help presell. Examples include short ebooks, product selection guides and relevant industry information.

Some companies are afraid of giving away their expertise. But if you don’t educate your prospects by providing them with free relevant content, how can you expect them to really understand and invest in your products and services?

My personal recommendation is to give away information in the form of ebooks, tip sheets or white papers. On the very last page of your download, you can add a little commercial about your products and services as well as your website URL and complete contact info.

In addition, you should require web visitors to enter their name and email so that you can start building an online list of interested contacts. Be careful to not ask for too much information at this stage. Most people will not fill out long forms even if the information is free.

Develop a Compelling Guarantee

If you are having difficulty differentiating yourself from the competition, think of how you might create a compelling guarantee. A rock-solid guarantee can do a lot to remove the barrier for purchase.

So what constitutes a compelling guarantee? How about a lifetime guarantee or a double your money back guarantee? Sure, you may get a few people to take you up on it, but you’ve now greatly reduced the friction to purchase as the prospect has nothing to lose.

These 4 simple strategies have the power to greatly increase the conversion from prospect to paying customer. Start implementing them today.