Tomicide Solutions December 2006: Eight Benefits of Using Education-Centred Direct Respoonse Marketing
By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan
SIo, what's your marketing based on? Is it pushing your stuff or educating qualified prospects about the benefits of your stuff?
When you do your marketing, you have two options. Most peddlers do sales-based marketing. That is, every message they put out tries to sell something to someone. The "What" and the "Who" are irrelevant really. Just sell anything to anyone whatever it takes. The fact is that the audience has become more sophisticated over the years, and they more substance not less style. A few years ago it was enough to send out some glib smooth-talking peddlers to the marketplace armed with closing and objection-handling skills, but today's marketplace demands a bit more.
Unfortunately, many businesses are still practising old-fashioned pushy sales methods instead of educating people into making educated decisions for themselves. Old fashion prospecting is about convincing people to buy your stuff in a "Hey, wanna buy my stuff" fashion. Sadly it is still rampant among many professions, insurance, real estate and car sales being the worst. Survey after survey shows that these people are the pushiest and most aggressive in closing deals.
Education-centred marketing is about giving people valuable information, and based on what they receive, they can decide whether or not they want to do business with you. You must understand the idea is not about converting everyone who walks, crawls or flies into paying clients. The idea is selecting prospects who have the potential to become "great clients". And this process starts with giving valuable free information to prospects that allow them to take or not take the next step. And that free information must be something different from what the competition offers. I also believe it must be very specific otherwise it loses its value.
While traditional sales-based messages are self-centred, bragging about the seller's abilities, services and products, education-based messages talk about specific problems of the target market. You can tell me that you are selling the best burglar alarm system but unless and until you educate me that in my area 13 houses get burgled every week at an average financial loss of $34,700 per home, and I have 47% chance to be the next victim, I won't listen. If you further educate me that 27% of those burglaries end in kidnapping or manslaughter, then I will listen even more. Then I am a captive audience for you to learn more about your alarm system. But not for the sake of your alarm system but for the sake of my security.
Again, you can say that this is scare tactics. Why? I'm just sharing the facts. Ignoring the facts is lunacy. And sharing the obvious is not scare-mongering. Just think of doctors. Do they do scare-mongering when they state matter-of-factly that you need this operation or have only six months to live, and he can back this statement with empirical data?
Is it scare-mongering when you tell someone that if he lies in front of a bulldozer, he will die? There is plenty of supporting data to validate your statement.
But if I start pushing your hot button, with statements, like "If you love your family as much as you say you do, you'll buy my alarm system right now" or "You don't want to get your children killed, do you?" This is scumbaggy. Stating commonly available statistics is a form of caring.
The problem is that when you practise scaring techniques to instantly close deals, your prospects know you're chasing them and they run like hell. And they don't run quietly. They are screaming "Danger, danger! Peddler alert! Run for your lives, people!" People know that peddlers manipulate them to make money in any which way as quickly as possible. They also know that they have no chance to resist peddlers' charm and glibness, so they avoid them altogether.
The other situation is networking events, most of which are really beggar's banquets. Everyone tries to sell you something. They are so focused on one-off sales right now that they don't have time to educate me and wait until I trickle through their sales funnels and buy something of my own accord. When they introduce themselves they talk about themselves and their stuff but show virtually no interest in me and my problems. They just want to give me their pitches and make money on me as soon as humanly possible.
That's plain diabolical. How much more attractive a piece of education would be in the form of "I can send you an article on your biggest headache" or something similar? When your objective is education, you can ferret out opportunities to which you can better match your offer. By the time you educate me about holes and let me tell you about the kind of hole I need to solve a specific problem, you can offer me the exactly the right kind of drill to make that hole. And I'm likely to accept it without price objection.
That's valuable. But when you're pitching me on drill in general, you come across as a peddler, as a common pest and a pedestrian, garden-variety pain in the arse.
Benefits of Education-Centred Marketing
1. You can match what prospects need with what you offer. That allows you to make the most attractive offer because you can take time to discover the prospect's problem from a holistic perspective. No problem exists in isolation. Remember, what the prospect says her problem is, is merely the symptom she's experiencing. She needs you diagnosis to find out what she really needs. Most people want the easiest, not the best solutions. Many people with toothaches keep taking buckets of painkillers for weeks and months to cover up the symptoms, instead of going to the dentist and deal with the root cause of the toothache.
2. You come across as a caring professional intended to improve the client's condition not as a desperate peddler in search of the next commission cheque. You earn respect and maintain your dignity. Realistically, all you do is diagnosing a problem and let the prospect to choose whether or not to seek remedy from you. This is why doctors are highly respected. People are not afraid to visit them because they are worried that doctors try to sell them something. All right, people may be scared shitless of the possible pain. but for being sold. Doctors just diagnose you and let you decide, "Sir, based on my diagnosis, your right arm will fall out in about 6 months. What that means is that you lose your $250,000 a year job as a commercial pilot. Since you have 10 years to retirement, that's a potential loss of $2.5 million. Where should we go from here?" Do you feel manipulated or "closed" for a deal. The doctor just stated the facts. The rest is up to you.
3. You will be perceived as a trustworthy authority in your field who is also worth referring to. Hint: Would you refer your friends and family members to a hard-selling peddler? How many of your friends or relatives have you referred to the person who you bought you car from or the Realtor you bought your home from. These are two of the hardest-selling professions, thus that's why so few people are good at it. Just think about it. Do you know anyone who's never tried to negotiate a Realtor's commission down, or never tried to beat up a car salesman on price? Why? Because they are not respected the same way as doctors or lawyers. But they also don't "sell" like doctors and lawyers. So, what creates this respect for doctors and lawyers? That they don't try to sell you as soon as you walk into their clinics and offices. You never hear from them the typical car salesman pitch, "Give me an offer and I'll give you a deal."
4. You can stop hunting for prospects. They seek you out as a recognised industry expert. They respect you, your methods and your fees and prices.
A few years ago I helped a BMW dealership to fine-tune its sales programmes. The objective was to find some diplomatic ways of telling "non-BMW calibre" prospects that if they're looking for hyper-low prices and super low interest rates, then they'd better go to a Ford or a GM dealership* at the end of the road, and select something that is more appropriate to their budget and social status. Actually we started questioning prospects to give us good reasons why we should accept them as clients and allow them to join the BMW constellation.
*In May 2005, The Securities and Exchange Commission reduced Ford's and GM's stock rating to the "junk" category.
Short-term sales were lost by turning people away, but the position of the dealership became stronger. In order to book an appointment with a sales consultant, people had to provide written proof that they had the means to buy a BMW or had an approved loan for financing. That was either a bank statement, a credit report, a line of credit or something that indicated that this person wasn't a tyre-kicker. Some inappropriate prospects rebelled, but in general the change went down well. That's heavy-duty qualification and it takes some serious guts to do. But having done it paid off pretty well.
5. You can reach prospects even before the competition has a chance to talk to them. And here is the key. You don't have to try to convert these prospects into paying clients right away. If you try you can scare them away into the welcoming arms of your competitors. What you do is you develop a prospect nurturing system. Using farm language, it looks like this...
You plant your seeds (generate leads) and then - using an automated sprinkler system - you water the seeds on a regular basis (stay in touch with your new leads using valuable and pertinent information, as opposed to sales pitches). And every now and then there is a little extra work to pull out the weeds that grow in your patch (Polishing your Ideal Client profile and fine-tuning your lead generation system). But the reality is that you have to sacrifice some of your enjoyment of eating the already ripened goodies (Serving paying clients) to take care of the needs that will feed you and your family tomorrow (Long-term cashflow and prosperity).
6. You can find some prospects who are too timid to call. They may be worried that there will be a hard-nosed and "amazingly" skilled tele-peddler on the phone, and they will be sold something against their own wills. However, they are willing to request valuable information, if you can make that information available automatically, without human interaction. Don't get me wrong; people carve human interaction. But first they want to figure out what sort of people they will interact with upon contacting you. This is why it's vital to put the human side of your company of your website. You can't expect people to trust a faceless monstrosity of a website based on hype and self-aggrandisement.
7. You can better track you marketing efforts, so you know which message to change to increase response rate. If you invest money in an activity, you'd better track the results pretty closely. Otherwise the whole effort is wasted. On your car's dashboard you have various gadgets that track speed, engine revolution, coolant's temperature and even some mysterious stuff. Can you imagine driving your car without the ability of looking at your gadgets? Not really. A few years ago a pilot told me that on the Boeing 747 under normal circumstances pilots use - only - seven instruments to keep themselves on track.
Similarly, you have to develop key progress indicators for your business. I also recommend clients to track "soft" or qualitative indicators (feelings) instead of "hard" or quantitative indicators (monthly sales, etc.). Soft indicators are causes, whereas hard indicators are effects. When the soft indicators are within a pre-defined range, the hard indicators take care of themselves. As driving your car, if you're "gentle" (soft indicator) with your pedals, fuel consumption can go only down, and you save money. It can't go up. If you're a subscriber, go to the "subscribers only" resources section, and start using the right tool for tracking.
8. You create a competitive edge for yourself because all your competitors use the same idiotic one-step peddling model: "Hi, I'm Fred. How are you today? I'm in your area and would like to drop by to sell you my stuff. Let's sit down and give me your money... now!"
The market has become more sophisticated than ever before. Besides, your buyers, unlike in B2C selling, are professional buyers. You can't fool them with pitches that worked in the last millennium. They make their decisions based on their due diligence. Remember, just as you attend seminars on getting to decision makers, they too attend seminar on how to avoid being tricked by peddlers and avoid unnecessary appointments.
Summary
So, what can you do to change your "instant gratification" type marketing to an education-centred programme?
Well, for a start you have to change your mindset. The goal is not to turn each and every prospect into paying client, but to initiate a nurturing process which your prospects enjoy participate in, and they buy when they are ready to buy.
But this is hard in an environment where greedy sales managers pressurise and threaten their people to work harder to reach and exceed quota. The question is this: Is the quota method still valid? Can business development folks perform at their best and brightest when the mantra is to bring in more clients whatever it takes?
The sad thing is that they do. They can use manipulative phrases to scare the shit out of prospects, so they end up buying out of fear. But will this approach create the trust-based relationships between buyers and seller. I don't think so. if you sell like a peddler, you're a peddler. And the other interesting problem is that clients know that the way you sell is the way you will work them. If your sales process is pushy, then you're pushy as a service provider.
In military strategy victory is not equal to the total annihilation of the enemy. Often victory can be achieved with minimum bloodshed. It's enough to kill only the leader(s). Similarly, in business development you don't have to go for the total exploitation of the prospect's piggy bank. They feel when someone starts fiddling with their purse strings, and they don't like it. Well, would you?
But if you play your cards right, when prospects are ready to change, there is a very good chance that they will change with you. There are some defectors who take your information but go to your competitors for their low prices, but that's good for you. These low level "bottom of the scum barrel" clients actually do you a favour by leaving alone and go and annoy and waste the time and money of your competitors.
Think about it. How well does your existing marketing work for you? If it doesn't work so well, then maybe it's time to look into alternatives.Attribution: "This article was written by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan who helps privately held information technology companies to develop high leverage client acquisition systems and business development teams in order to sell their products and services to premium clients at premium fees and prices. Visit Tom's website at http://www.varjan.com.
