Every journey has a starting point. In the sales and marketing business that is generally the point at which it becomes clear something is amiss. It may not be a pain point yet, just a tickle of discomfort or a vague uneasiness. Perhaps the landscape has changed? Customer behavior seems to be shifting. Your marketing campaigns are not working as well as they were last year. Existing sales processes don’t seem to be converting so well.
You’re tempted to reach for an antacid. You shift the monitor on your desk. Adjust your chair height. Nope its still there… That nagging drumming in your ears. Faint, but still oddly menacing. Can it really be true that we’ve reached phase five of the project[1]
So it was for Moment Storm. We understood that the sales process was changing at a fundamental level. Let’s take a look at how the ‘Invisible Sale’ spurred us to action. First let’s take a look at the fundamental changes occurring in your sales funnel. The search for solutions begins.
Clearly your organization needs to be on the end of these searches your potential customers are doing. In fact, when you turn up often enough in your customers’ self-educating searches, you’ll come to be seen as an expert in their eyes. Tom Martin of Converse Digital explains this process very well.
People trust experts. Why? Because expertise is defined by the buyer, not the seller. What makes one person or company an expert isn’t the company telling you it’s the expert. It’s the customer, the buyer or the prospective buyer, forming that conclusion based on the information the company shares, the insights it provides, and the quality of work that you review. And part of what makes an expert is a willingness to help, even when that help isn’t going to immediately or financially reward the expert. Helpful content, whose intent is truly to help, educate, or enable, creates a feeling of expertise in the mind of the reader. And that expertise can then be leveraged in the future and turns an invisible lead into a very visible customer.
Tom Martin
The Invisible Sale
This leads to the obvious question, how do you position yourself to become that expert resource for your self-educating customers? The answer – understand exactly what your potential customers are researching. Respond with relevant educational content that meets their need for quick and useful information.
Increasingly your customers are on the web using their mobile devices. A mobile moment is a point in time and space when someone pulls out a mobile device to get what he or she wants immediately, in context. The confluence of mobile and video is the sweet spot you need to occupy. Create hyper-relevant customer experiences that build awareness, trust and loyalty. Most importantly, educate rather than sell. Your priority is to build strong relationships and establish your expertise in the eyes of your market.
Our posts over the coming weeks will show you how to have a learning impact – a very different skill set than marketing features and benefits. Starting with video as the accessible inroad for your message, you will learn how to build customer knowledge based on solid learning principles. When you educate rather than sell, you gain deep and rapid credibility. This leads to trust which in turn strengthens your now visible customer’s connection to your organization.
There are five key steps to launching your Video Learning Moments™ strategy:
- Determine the questions your potential customers are researching
- Craft quick, high value answers that build trust and credibility
- Make the information easy to access on mobile through video
- Provide supplementary learning resources to deepen their knowledge
- Promote your content to ensure you are easily found when they research
These are only the first steps to unveiling the invisible sale, but they are critical. Most importantly, once you commit to this new direction you will be pleasantly surprised at how easily you can implement this process.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_phases_of_a_big_project