Turning Visitors Into Friends

  In my most mercenary moments I will cry that this is all about finding buyers, that nothing else matters but making the sale.

  In my more enlightened moments I may declare that it is essential to romance your potential customers into loving you and your business - to shower them with kindness so they will eventually bloom and shower you with dollars.

  The realistic approach lies somewhere in between these two extremes. Finding buyers is essential - go too long without finding enough and you’ll be out of business. Yet people respond to kindness and are repelled, generally, by brazen, unapologetic salesmanship.

  If you appreciate good salespeople you are probably a student yourself and understand both how essential and how challenging the job is.

  Most people, your customers, are terrified of salespeople. They are afraid of having one put over on them by slick and sleazy sales tactics.

  In order to overcome the record-high levels of sales-resistance you need to put a kinder facade on a marketing and selling system which is, behind the scenes, brutally efficient.

  You must deliver service with a smile, address the fears and concerns of your prospects with empathy and goodwill - never getting frustrated with their hand-wring and small insecurities and neediness for reassurance.

  Your customers are terrified of the water. They know that sharks are on the loose. They seek safe harbor.

  Give it to them. Give them sanctuary, nourishment, compassion, empathy. Yet beneath it all your marketing decisions must be tough-minded.

  The problem with most marketing is that fully half or more of the money and resources put into it are wasted on courting prospects who will never buy. The best marketing systems work to eliminate these people from costly marketing attention.

  The best, most likely, most qualified buyers must be courted today with great care. People are fickle and if they are not fully aware that your business offers superior advantages in terms of service, pleasantness, and so on they will be forced to make their buying decisions basd on the only quantifiable measure of value they can easily grasp : PRICE.

If you do not know how to make your prospects and customers eager to buy from YOU because you offer them something they believe they can’t get elsewhere - then your forced them to look at price.

  Competing on low prices will be disastrous to your business. All businesses that compete on the price issue alone eventually suffer because of it. A competitor will come along who is able to lose more money than you are and he will put you out of business by beating your prices.