Making your customers dream is one thing … delivering what you sell is another!
Make people dream by telling the story of their company, their product, staging themselves or their company, that is the art of storytelling. You become the hero of your own story, humanize your communication and demonstrate your values. The approach then arouses the support of a community which will then attach itself to this representation.
You capture the attention of your prospects and retain your customers. If storytelling is an art rather practiced by marketing experts and requires increased vigilance so as not to fall into manipulation, overselling is practiced more commonly at all levels of the purchasing cycle, mostly by selling power.
Overselling the Dream
To oversell is to make a promise and not being able to keep it, knowing full well that the probability of fulfillment will be low. Promise of deadlines, functional promise, price promise, product promise, result promise … This desire to sell at any cost naturally translates after the purchase into a customer disenchantment which can cost the company dearly, in the end.
Customers and prospects regularly share with previous experiences with service providers that ultimately led to a gap between promise and reality. Why is this damaging to their business?
Selling needs to be always positive and reactive towards the needs expressed by prospects. But wanting to sell at all costs simply to say yes to each request from your prospects and customers is a mistake in positioning. Do not sell unattainable dreams if you can’t deliver.
When we say “no” to our customers or prospects
Because we don’t have a magic wand or a crystal ball. If the telephone remains today the best channel for acquiring truly qualified prospects and making appointments, cold telephone prospecting requires more rigor and perseverance than ever. By adding digital to our offer, we simply allow our telemarketing team to call warmer prospects, improve the ratios on the outgoing call, make a warm call and gain in quality on the potential of conversion by our customers of the appointments delivered.
To make appointments, generating leads via digital is not enough. Having a website is good. Having a website that converts (landing page, form, call to action, etc.) is great. Having inbound contacts is very good. But even if your inbound contact is a web form to book an online demonstration of software, or a request for a quote on a service … what do you really know about the prospect?
Does he have a project? Is he the only decision maker? What about the purchasing cycle? What is his budget? So many questions necessary to qualify the lead before transmitting to the sale. And rare are the B2B meetings that are taken without picking up the phone. The telephone exchange remains the only way to qualify and convert your lead into a sales opportunity.
This is why we should say no to prospects who want an appointment only with digital prospecting. The reason is not to do digital to make digital because it is trendy, but to deliver appointments!
Digital without social networks and without content, is mission impossible.
Because you don’t attract flies with vinegar. Yes, digital prospecting works. Yes, a well thought out multichannel acquisition strategy and with the right tools, it works. Yes, generating qualified prospects and incoming leads is possible. But a strategy of content without content is impossible.
The content is: blog articles, videos, testimonials, infographics … in short, materials on the internet to establish your expertise and reassure your know-how. So that the prospect selects you and not your competitor when looking for a provider.
The main thing is not just to have a Linkedin profile or a blog, but to participate and to be active on the internet.
You can support clients in defining their content strategy and their multi-channel acquisition, without being a purely content agency. Define what they must produce as content (type, format, frequency, etc.) and the involvement of customers then becomes essential in the implementation.
Multichannel prospecting without the right tools is complicated.
Who says multichannel says multiple points of contact and not just a linkedin profile and emails. It is a question of having a tool which centralizes and manages all the points of contact, to know which message to send, to whom, when and by which channel.
Combine marketing and commercial performance and efficiency. Align marketing and sales efforts. Scale your marketing and commercial approach. Of course, prospecting without tools is possible. But automating tasks saves time and efficiency.
What may be obvious to some is not necessarily obvious to others. To say no to a prospect is to guard against his future disenchantment as a customer if he was sold dreams, to have a clear promise, to commit, to respect his positioning and to deliver what has been sold.
