Content Crooner



photo credit: ottonassar

Who wants to buy from someone who assumes they completely understand our needs before we even talk to them? Whether you exercise classic or cutting-edge sales and marketing techniques, you must always listen to your prospects first. Tell someone what they need before they have a chance to actually tell you and you’ll immediately turn them off to the sale. Without face-to-face interaction, online businesses are tasked with the challenge of providing answers without being presumptuous. Employing several different marketing tactics that involve prospect and client research allows you to step up to this challenge.

Blogs Provide a Direct Pulse on Your Prospects

One of the most effective ways of providing answers without sounding presumptuous is to use your audience’s own words. Writing frequent blog posts not only provides your prospects and clients with useful information and entertaining tidbits, it also provides an ideal platform for research. Use your audience’s comments and responses to your blog posts to get a solid bead on what they require for full satisfaction in your product or service. Writing on a variety of topics will help you accomplish an even greater scope of their hot buttons, desires, fears, etc.

Phone Calls Provide Live Research

Have a pen and paper or a blank word processor doc open the next time you get a prospect or client on the phone and take notes! One of the most potent means of making a sale is to make direct references to what they’ve said. Regardless of the topic, you can almost always find a point to argue in someone else’s comments. However, few are bold or humble enough to go back against themselves and argue their own words. Caveat: Avoid any hint of manipulation with this tactic—they’re sure to be angered by having their own words caustically thrown in their face. Simply bring up a direct quote of theirs in a friendly manner as a way to help clarify the issue at hand.

Nothing is too insignificant to take note of! From recording how many children they have to who their favorite sports team is, you’ll eventually collect enough info points to paint a comprehensive picture of who your prospect/client really is and what they need or desire from a product or service. Plus, taking notes helps you maintain a human side to your business, and people always prefer to buy from someone who demonstrates compassion and thoughtfulness.

Save all of your notes to refer to throughout your business relationship. This will help you best serve that particular person as well as help you compare your notes for other people and eventually highlight money making trends.

Profitable Polling

Take a more direct approach and attach a poll to your website. You can actually find a number of free polling applications that require little effort to integrate them within your site. These polls give you complete liberty in the questions you ask, allowing you to garner highly useful feedback. And don’t be afraid to have fun with these, too. Ask the occasional silly question to show people you have a sense of humor and that you’re not just mining for information all the time.

E-mail Management

Have your customer service reps monitor certain issues and hot buttons that frequently pop up and record them in an ongoing spreadsheet. You can also use keyword filtering to uncover important trends within your customer e-mails.

Articles Are the Collective Cherry on Top

You can top all of this off by writing a series of ongoing articles that address all the important issues and trends you discovered throughout your prospect and client research. This highly targeted and efficient approach will continuously boost your sales.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!