Have you noticed how enraged people can get if they feel they are being sold to? “Stop. Calling. Me.” You know what I’m talking about. I’m pretty sure many of you don’t like to be called even if you have calling within your business model. You’re not alone, though. Some people even hate it when friends or family are calling them just to talk. People don’t even want to talk on the phone anymore!
And then you have things like direct mail, billboards, television and radio commercials. How is that working for you? Not well, I suspect. The real billboard, the real television fits on our lap or in the palm of our hand. People are consuming their media from their mobile platform or from their tablets or even other devices like Alexa. Everything is streaming over Internet.
In many cases we do this to minimize expenses and that to avoid commercials. We don’t like to be sold to; but then for some strange reason, we are jumping on their phone and they are interacting with social media by what we just watched, or checking emails or something similar. People are avoiding you at all costs. So, how do you sell to somebody that doesn’t want to be sold to?
The Consumer Must Be The Decider
We as consumers are mentally geared to purchase but we want it to be our decision. Don’t approach me and sell to me because I want it to be my idea. I want to fall in love with this product. I want your story to be something that engages me, moves me, inspires me and make e feel like I belong. I am compelled to purchase or I am compelled to do something that creates an exchange.
I’ve had a lot of people asking me, “How do we sell to people that don’t want to talk to us? How do we market to people that do not care about us, that just want to look for whatever it is that they want to look for and then make a purchase?” Consumers are now more well informed than every. They look up every piece of information they can possibly find online and then they are do one of two things:
- They are going to the store and making the purchase or
- they are jumping over to their PC or their tablet.
More often than not, consumers are making purchases online. They don’t want to interact with you unless it’s their idea. Take car sales as an example. You drive onto a car lot and you are blitzed by sales people that want to sell you a car. What I’ve observed from personal experience and from my own research is that the dealerships that are less pressured to make a sale, that allow consumers to come to them, seemingly do better. They are not bothering anybody until the consumer has a need; until they have a desire to speak to them. It became their idea!
“Oh! I have questions now. I need a salesman so I can have these questions answered.”
How is this related to your business right now? Is your client falling in love with you before they even meet you? How are your stories affecting the lives of other people?
I don’t want to feel like you are selling to me. No one does. I want to be entranced with your life, with who you are, with your business, with your motivation. I want to know a company’s values, how they contribute to a greater good, and I want to fall in love with that company. That is when I want you in my life; when I need you in my life. I need to feel that if I don’t have you or have your product in my life, my life will not be what it should be.
This is exactly how your customer is thinking.
I was watching Gary Vaynerchuk last night, and he said; “I urge you, I compel you to market your business in the age that we live in.” Market your business in the year that we live in. Are you marketing your business like you should be marketing your business? Are you marketing your business the best way for you? Or are you marketing your business the best for the consumer?
I have a lot of clients who have no idea how to reach their consumer because of what they’ve learned from traditional marketing. We now have all these new platforms that are quickly becoming old platforms while new people are saying “Hmmm, maybe we should start looking into that MySpace thing.” Ummm…yeah. You should have started a long, long time ago. If you want bring your customer in, you need to learn how your consumer thinks and then market like your consumer thinks; and you need to do this yesterday.
Market your business in a way that your consumer can fall in love with you. Share your story. Show them how you’ve solved problems. Show your worth and your clients will be compelled to reach out. They’ll have no choice, but they’ll believe they are the ones who made the ultimate decision to engage with you. In that scenario, the consumer retains control, and that’s what they want.
Question for you to consider: How can you ensure that your clients are hearing your story and are seeing your name every time they get online? That is how you are going to get to your consumer. And it may take a couple of months, it may take three, four, five…and in the real estate business, sometimes it’s a 12-18 month integration period. Real estate sales brings an additional challenge: How can you remain in front of those people for long enough that when the time is right, they are going to their phone and they are finally going to press that contact button so that you can solve the problems they’ve had this entire time?
Some may even be doing this without thinking or knowing that you are doing it and it’s simply working for you. That’s great, but I’m meeting a lot of people that say things like “How on earth do I get this new idea in front of my client?” If you are struggling with this, you are not alone. The trick is to market the way that your consumer wants to be marketed to. They want to engage on their terms.
Simple, but not easy.
Go forth and be awesome. Go forth and tell a story.
