Article by Matrix Marketing, MD Steve Trehair
Selling is all about knowing how to communicate. The more focused and clear your communication is, the easier it is to understand. The web is a powerful selling tool as it provides good communicators with an unprecedented platform for expanding their network and influence.
Sales leads usually come from two sources, outbound and inbound marketing efforts. Both are important but we are seeing a big shift towards inbound marketing.
What is outbound marketing?
Outbound marketing means approaching potential customers and selling to them directly because you assume that they have a need for a certain product or service. Tactics include cold calling, email marketing, referrals and snail mail.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing means prospects seek out your products or services because they have a need or problem that they believe your business can potentially solve. These prospects will get in touch with you directly since they’ve already done some research online.
We all love to buy things but we don’t particularly like being sold to.
You’ll be pressed to find someone who doesn’t turn to the web before making a purchase simply because it helps them make better buying decisions. It’s for this reason that businesses need to start thinking about inbound marketing and how they can use the web to attract potential customers.
Why do communication skills matter?
If you want to improve your sales results you need to know how to communicate online using writing, video and more. Your communication skills can be used on a variety of platforms including social media and blogs.
This isn’t to say that you should be pushing your products online, instead, you should be talking about topics that your target audience would find interesting and that relate to specific needs or problems that they might be experiencing.
Basic pipeline stats tell me that if a sales person needs to generate ten sales per month and they have a suspect-to-prospect ratio of 10% and a prospect-to-close ratio of 10%, they’d need to be working on building relationships with 1,000 targeted suspects to meet this monthly requirement. If you consider an annual requirement of 120 deals, a base of thousands of contacts would be required.
This goes to show why being a great communicator is such an important sales skill, you must “talk” to a lot of potential clients, to convert sufficient numbers and why using profiled contact data from specialist data suppliers, is a necessary tactic in 2017. With it, you have the power to rifle in on your specific target market.
Matrix Marketing is a proud Partner of the NSBC.