The Buying Cycle
The answers to why people don’t buy now and how to have them buy from you in the future.
Isn’t it odd that when you present your offer to someone and they say no?
Well, not really. Assuming the whole Know, Like, and Trust thing is taken care of, then chances are it’s because they’re not in the buying part of the cycle just yet.
“But my offer is outstanding, they are my target market, everyone should say yes, it’s that good” I hear you say. Well, no.
As an example, let’s say you sell websites, if the prospect just got a shiny new website, then chances are slim that they will want to buy a replacement one the following day. At some point after that, maybe 2 or even 5 years later, they are going to think about a new website. Their current one is no longer up to date, it looks dated, or the business has changed direction.
Whatever the reason, unless you happen to by chance get in touch and pitch your website offering in the small window of opportunity, then it’s likely to go to the person that does.
Unless …
Unless of course you’re aware of the buying cycle and have kept yourself top of the prospects mind. By keeping you top of mind over the months or years leading up to when the prospect thinks it’s time to update the website, then you’re the one they are going to want involved.
What most sales reps usually do however is say, “oh you don’t want to buy, good bye then.” And that’s it; they don’t bother to do anything after that. The alternative is to keep in touch with the prospect, so when they do want to say yes, it’s you they come to.
So how do you keep the awareness of you over this time while you’re waiting for them to buy?
Here’s what to do to keep you top of mind:
- Add Value
- Educate
- Do it regularly
- Automate it
- Personalise it
Add value by giving freely of your ideas and suggestions and this doesn’t have to be solely related to your product or service.
Educate your prospects; help them understand the benefit of your product or service and the return on investment for them. Do with testimonials and other proof from customers.
Do it regularly, after 90 days your prospect has forgotten about you, probably sooner. Regularly get in touch to educate and add value.
Automate it; use email auto-responders to send out scheduled emails. Couple this with using your CRM or reminders in Outlook to follow up using other means such as by phone or direct mail.
Personalise it. Email auto-responders can merge data into the email, typically the prospects first name, don’t overdo it however. The emails or other “templated” materials you send out should be read by the prospect thinking you wrote this to them and only to them.
Last words. You have prospects that aren’t in buying mode just yet; however, will be at some point in the future. Rather than forget all about the prospect, nurture them until they are ready to buy. So keep them warm and to keep you on top of their mind, regularly add value and educate them, personalise the communication, and automate as much of it as possible. Automating it means it does actually get done, it’s repeatable, and other people can do some of it for you, so it frees up your time.
Test, Track, and Tweak Your Marketing
The other day a colleague mentioned that a big company had got onto the idea of testing and tracking their marketing. Excellent I said.
Trouble is they had taken the concept to the extreme and were only doing marketing that they could track.
The idea of testing, tracking and tweaking your marketing is so you can made marketing decisions based on the numbers, not some gut feel or one what looks nice. First up you run your marketing campaign (in other words you test it). Then you track the response you get from it such as how many leads a week it generates. As you come up with ways to improve it, you make a tweak (in other words a small change) and get this out in the market place (that is, test it). Then guess what? Yes, we track how it does. Compare this to the previous one, essentially keep what works best and cull what doesn’t.
Let’s get back to the story. So as not to identify who the company is, we’ll say they sell widgets. These aren’t the cheapest, nor the best quality, however, the deliver what they say they do and have been growing their sales over the last few years.
Enter a new manager, with the mantra of only doing marketing that can be tested and tracked.
Exit Sales. Yes, sales are now down 25% over the last 6 months. Agreed the current market has not been the most hospitable for widgets, and the company does have some seriously big competitors.
Really though, the big change was not the economy, it was the change in marketing. Basically what they did was slash and burn any marketing they deemed un-trackable. I know, crazy.
So now, yes they can track the marketing. Trouble is, sales have plummeted.
Here’s the kicker. Can you imagine what the new marketing plan they have put in place it all about? Grow it back to least what it was doing and some, I hear you say. No. No, their grand plan is to stabilise the plummeting and stop it dropping any more; I shake my head in disbelief.
Here’s what would have been a saner, safer, and in the end, more profitable approach:
- Put tracking in place where possible.
- DO NOT stop any existing marketing at this point (regardless of whether it’s being tracked or not).
- Think. There’s always ways of tracking where your sales are coming from.
- Put these new tracking ideas into place.
- Tweak and split test existing marketing.
- Do more of what works best.
- Rinse and repeat.
- Cull stuff that gives low Return on Investment on time and or money – after you have proof.
The big mistake this company, and in particular, this new manager made, was killing off marketing because they believed they could not track its performance.
Once I heard what it was they killed off, it was immediately obvious how with a little tweak they could track the results. The sad thing about the campaign they killed was it was to a highly targeted, captive, and motivated audience.
Hey, I don’t know the exact numbers (though, nor do they), however, from thinking about the campaign and medium they were using, I am sure it would have been an excellent source of leads.
So if someone suggests you kill off your marketing that you can’t track, run, don’t walk, run, they are a danger to your business.
Imagine if someone said to you that you should stop your Yellow Pages book advertising and you haven’t been tracking the results it generates. If you kill that off, it’s a year before you can get back in, what if you get leads every month from it, yet don’t know because you don’t track it? Before you make a decision like that, you’ve got to know the numbers, and then make an informed decision based on those numbers.
Last words – don’t kill off marketing you have in place without the numbers to back up your decision.