Fish or Cut Bait? How Knowing the Difference Helps Your Marketing
A sales manager of mine once told me that you need to know when to fish and when to cut bait. Although I donât fish, the analogy wasnât lost on me. In sales, thereâs a saying: âIf youâre going to lose, lose early.â
You may have heard the acronym AIDA used to describe the buying process. It stands for:
Attention
Interest
Desire
Action
I once read a comment someone heard from a car salesman: âI donât want the person that is in the beginning or middle of the buying process. Itâs too much work to help educate them and they always seem to buy somewhere else if at all. I want the person that is done searching and is ready to buy.â
People who are at the âactionâ stage are ready to buy. These are the best prospects you could ask for. Thatâs why Yellow Pages and search marketing are so successful, because the people who use them already know what they wantâtheyâre just searching for someone to buy from.
On the other hand, that uneducated potential buyer might be your next prospect. People who are at the âattentionâ, âinterestâ, or âdesireâ stage are what the car salesman described as being âin the beginning or middle of the buying processâ. The problem is, many of these will never reach the âactionâ stage. So how do you know who to invest time on and who not?
Finding prospects at the end of their buying cycle is a crucial component in sales. But talking to potential clients early in their buying cycle is relationship-buildingâand itâs a key component in your marketing. The former is hunting; the latter is farming. The trick is knowing whether youâre selling or whether youâre marketing, and adjusting your behavior to fit.
For example, I met someone at a chamber meeting who told me that he might need my services. So when I phoned him, I was making a sales call. But it soon became apparent that this person was nowhere near ready to buy. So I switched to relationship-building modeâthat is, I didnât try to set an appointment, but spent about 20 minutes with him, offered some advice, then referred him to an article on my website that had more information. I continued to drip-market to him, but I didnât waste time pursuing him as if he were a lead.
In the web business, if you take the car salesmanâs attitude, youâll never build enough relationships to develop any marketing gravity, so youâll always be on the hunt for that next person whoâs âready to buy.â Yet, if you constantly take the ârelationship-buildingâ approachâfreely meeting and talking to anyone and everyone, and giving away all kinds of free adviceâyouâll always be a valuable source of free information that nobody ever buys from.
