We are always told about the importance of building relationships and rapport with our prospects when we are in sales.
But if you are not in a ‘brick and mortar’ style of business, and you conduct your business primarily online, how do you do this?
When you are face to face with a prospect, you have the opportunity to ‘size each other up’. By listening to their prospect’s, needs a good salesman can quickly decide if they have a product/ service to help meet these needs, and begin to give their prospect benefit driven information about the product or service and outline how it can help them.
A good salesperson listens to their prospects
What do I mean by benefit driven?
I mean, that rather than listing the features of a product or service (e.g. in the case of a car – it has leather seats and seat warmers, seven airbags and ABS brakes), you would flesh out how this will benefit the prospect. For example, leather seats and seat warmers are luxurious and comfortable for you to enjoy in colder climates, and the leather is excellent for families, as any spills wipe clean. The airbags and ABS brakes provide the ultimate in safety for you and your family.
Got the idea?
So now to the Internet…how do we replicate this process when we are marketing online?
Fortunately for us, the newest and most valuable form of currency online is information.
People are online all day, every day in their hundreds of millions searching for information about issues and problems that are important to them.
And this is your opportunity to capture their attention (I’ll talk about how you do this more in another post), and give them high quality information that has a high perceived value to them, and helps them in part, solve their problems or challenges.
The way you deliver this information, is via a free report or e-book, and then follow up with autoresponders, to continue to build on the relationship you have initiated.
When you provide good quality content to your prospect, they feel that they can trust you. Subconsciously, they feel that you care about them and their problems, and that you most likely have more information, or a product or service that can help them solve their problem or meet their need.
And as you continue to communicate with the people on your list, that sense of trust grows to the extent that they are receptive to any other offers you make to them, that you feel would be useful or appropriate to them.
This is key. Never abuse the position you are in when people trust you as a marketer. Always maintain an ethical, honest, win-win position in your marketing.
Because having people trust you is not an entitlement, trust and respect has to be earned.
Cheers,
Tanya
