In this Expert Insight Interview, Ben Worthen discusses taking advantage of non-sales moments to drive growth. Ben Worthen is the CEO of Message Lab, which combines journalism, data, and design to help organizations create content that resonates with real people.
This Expert Insight Interview discusses:
- How to start thinking about your customers and prospects as people
- How to engage with your audience when they’re not looking to buy from you
- Why it is essential to nurture your relationship with your prospects
Your Customers Are Just People
In pretty much any company, everything is oriented towards sales. This is normal, as it is what keeps companies in business. The problem with this approach is that it forces us to think of people as customers or prospects when in reality, a person is only a customer or a prospect for a small amount of time.
Most of the time, our customers and prospects are just people, and people have needs that don’t necessarily align with your product. This means they will spend a lot of their day thinking about things that do not necessarily relate to the product you’re selling but probably fit into the broader picture of your company.
Engaging With Your Audience
Think about how you relate to your audience and engage with them when they’re not looking to buy your product. To add value, you need to create something that resonates with your audience, which requires more creativity than traditional marketing.
The best approach, in most cases, is to make things that are meant to engage people around ideas that they care about — content that informs them, entertains them, or provides any other form of value to them when they are not in “customer mode.”
Nurturing the Relationship
It all begins with getting outside of your head, and outside of the walls of your company, and thinking about the things that your audience members care about in all the “other” moments of their life.
Good salespeople can do this innately, but sometimes even they tend to stick to the sales path and believe that unless they’re moving towards a sale, they are not providing anything of value for the customer or the company. The fact is that your prospects will not be ready to buy most of the time, so you should be thinking about what you can do to nurture that relationship.
Our Host
John is the Amazon bestselling author of Winning the Battle for Sales: Lessons on Closing Every Deal from the World’s Greatest Military Victories and Social Upheaval: How to Win at Social Selling. A globally acknowledged Sales & Marketing thought leader, speaker, and strategist, he has conducted over 1500 video interviews of thought leaders for Sales POP! online sales magazine & YouTube Channel and for audio podcast channels where Sales POP! is rated in the top 2% of most popular shows out of 3,320,580 podcasts globally, ranked by Listen Score. He is CSMO at Pipeliner CRM. In his spare time, John is an avid Martial Artist.
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