How Can We Make Our Prospects Believe Us?

If only they would believe everything we say. How easy selling would be.

After years of being conditioned to believe that marketers are liars (and sales people are worse), we as consumers have evolved into a very skeptical breed.  Sadly, our skepticism is often validated and reinforced by real-word experience in the marketplace.

So what do we do about it?  How do we differentiate ourselves and our message as simply being believable?  If we can figure this out, we’ll sell more (online and offline).  We’ll increase our conversion rates.  And we will be more profitable.

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Are You Ask Too Much of Your Marketing Materials?

Twice in two days, I’ve had the same conversation with marketers suffering from the same confusion. Both are organizations that rely on lead generation as the first step in their sales processes. That is to say, they expose prospects to their marketing message in an effort to move them to contact the company, learn more, and finalize a sale.

The problem both companies had (and I see this all the time) is they were falling into the trap of over-communicating in their marketing materials… telling their whole stories… every detail… forgetting that the goal of their marketing is not to close the sale on the spot. Rather, the goal is to motivate a prospect to call and engage in the sales process.

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Rewarding Referrals – the Power of Sincerity

When small businesses and high-touch service businesses mimic the referral rewards programs of big businesses, I would argue that they cheapen themselves and fail to maximize the potential yield of their referral sources.

What the heck am I talking about?

I’m referring to the difference between sincere yet deliberate (orchestrated) gratitude and what I call a “transparent referral economy.”

If you’re managing thousands of referrals and referral sources, at some point you may find that you have no choice but to build a simple referral economy. Refer a friend and get $10 off of your next purchase.  Refer two friends and you pay nothing for ….  A referral economy is a publicly stated formula for compensating referral sources.

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How We Judge Books… and What You Should Do About It

We’ve all heard the age-old admonishment. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

What a joke.

In a time when we are all subject to constant information overload, there literally is no time to judge a book – or anything else for that matter by anything more than its cover.

Thankfully, it appears that we human beings are intuitively equipped to make snap judgments with shocking accuracy. If you doubt this point, pick up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking). In it, he shares countless examples of people reaching amazingly insightful conclusions with seemingly almost no data on which to base their positions.

So why do I raise this issue?

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Beware of What You Know

For several years, I’ve been working on the development and launch of a consolidated electronic health record for consumers. This is a challenging undertaking for reasons I’ll likely share in a future post. But something happened that prompts me to write on the danger of familiarity.  I see it all the time in product development, marketing, sales system development, and even among entrepreneurs raising money for new ventures.

We were presenting a beta version of our portable health record to a group of first responders (EMTs). When you launch the health record, one of the first things you see is a collection of pictures of everyone whose records are on the drive (i.e. a family).  You then click the picture of the person whose records you wish to view. This is a practical feature in an emergency where the patient may not be conscious because it allows a visual verification of whose records a doctor is viewing.

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