Skip to main content

Crying Versus Bitching (Part 1)

There are two types of customer personas, those who are logically responsive and those who are emotionally responsive. To confuse an apparently simple issue, most of us have some of each type and can be more of one some days and more of the other on other days.

The moral is that it is important to identify which type of customer you are having a conversation with right from the beginning. Knowing your audience is perhaps the most overlooked and underdeveloped skill in marketing. Copywriters try to do it, consultants preach it, and analysts gather data about it, but most of what those people use to draw their conclusions is information, not intelligence - and customer intelligence is what you need to close deals.

Intelligence can only be gathered by interacting with customers. Sincerely and tactfully massaging a conversation to discover the needs and wants of each individual is the only way to finalize a sale. Of course, marketing materials, websites, and commercials have to hit a mass audience, but this segment is about closing a sale with a person, not a mass market.

Once you discover an individual's needs and wants, the type of conversation comes along organically. Of course, finding true needs and wants may or may not be as easy as you think. You should have two conversations in your pocket right now - one for the logical and one for the emotional. Alas, most folks have only one sales conversation and it usually falls into one of two categories - experienced and well-honed (yeah!) or dated and tired (boo!).

Stay tuned to discuss the logical conversation in Part 2 and the emotional conversation in Part 3.


Popular posts from this blog

What You See (Part 1)

When a camera takes in an image, it is objective and records what comes through its lens, without bias, not giving preference to one piece of information over another. The brown book sitting on the shelf is as important to the camera as the red fingernail raised toward the sky. When the brain takes in an image, it receives 400,000,000,000 bits of information each second, but only processes 2,000 of those bits because the brain has a network of neurons that has been trained to use associations, both of objections and of familiarity, to sort information into quickly usable portions of fuel for decision making. When watching a movie, is the focus on the streetlight in the background or the exploding truck in the foreground? The camera makes no separation between one bit of light and another, but the brain does.
Read more

Small Enough To Be Hugely Successful

For centuries, putting something on paper (disk, etc.) and distributing it has been exclusive to huge media companies. Anyone can create a website or a start a dry cleaner, but publishing has been traditionally dominated by gigantic media houses. No more. Along comes Lulu and enables anybody to publish a book. A real book - with hearty paper, professional covers, and a listing in the Library Of Congress ! One at a time, they turn them out. For less than the price of a DVD player you can even have your book distributed through the same mainstream channels from which companies such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon buy their inventory. The book certainly will not market itself, but it is definitely there in front of decision makers where it would never have been otherwise. Lulu has turned an entire industry on its ear by giving power back to creators and customers, alike. For industries like pharmaceuticals, where huge companies took the power of independent pharmacies , the pend
Read more