I recently read a book called “Positioning: The Battle For Your Mind. How to Be Seen and Heard in an Overcrowded Marketplace.” Thanks to Jeff Schmidt for suggesting it. The book identifies America as the first over communicated society due to all of its media options. The book was written in 1981 and other than a dated OJ Simpson endorsement reference, all the lessons have aged very well! If overcommunication was a problem in America in 1981, it is now exponentially worse.
Over time the job of sales and marketing professionals has become increasingly tougher because of all the media and marketing options. In America today marketers have an unlimited amount of options of where to put their messages and consumers (in both B to C and B to B world) have an increased amount of options of brands to purchase with an insane amount of options of how and where to purchase them. This holds true whether you’re buying a car, a cheeseburger or deciding on which actuarial services to use for your fortune 500 company.
The uncharted waters of 2020 have made these decisions even more chaotic and difficult for all of your customers. Josh Yudin states that in sales, our job is to bring order out of that chaos for our customers. This is more true now than at any previous time in history. Thus, if we bring order out of chaos effectively, we will set ourselves up for a successful 2021. How do we do this?
We focus our message on these things to our customers:
- Benefits
- Benefits
- Benefits
I like to call it the WIFM (what’s in it for me). When we’re mass marketing a product we want our customers to understand why they will be happy with the purchase and not what the widget actually does. When you’re selling a business product or service to someone, make sure the benefits of your product or service directly align with the business objectives of the potential customer – and explain how they are related. This will allow you to be the one to bring order to the uncharted waters your customers are trying to navigate and put you and your customers in a better position to win.
