by Michael De Wees

We all want to sell more of our products and services. It’s the basic driving force behind our business and we spend a lot of time researching and reading articles like this trying to find an edge. Yet it remains that two of the fundamental challenges in business are
1. get your service/product in front of a customer and
2. give them enough good information that causes them to buy your service/product.
Let’s explore how an educational strategy or social good approach makes you and the customer both winners.

Traditional methods have less impact on a busy, jaded business world that just does not have time or interest in your pitch. In The Ultimate Sales Machine Chet Holmes does a great job explaining the shortfalls of short-term sales pitch that focuses on the salespersons goal instead of the customers. Trying to extract a sale from a customer puts you in an adversarial battle of sorts where there is a winner and a loser.

It’s easy to say “give the customer what they want” but our fear is that he’ll want our top of the line for a bargain basement price. We need a strategy that does give the customer what they want but also makes it clear that it is your product or service that they want.

The educational or social good approach helps establish mutually beneficial relationship and rapport that transcend the often predator/prey relationship found in many sales approaches. Don’t go for the throat, go for.
> Respect
> Trust
> Referrals
> Expertise
> Influence
> Loyalty

By educating your customer you frame the buying criteria and lead them to the obvious conclusion that they should be buying from you.

Start with your presentation with an “elevator” pitch, that 30 second burst you would give if you only had a dozen or so floors on an elevator to give it. Keep it very general for mass appeal for we are trying to get as many customers as possible interested enough to listen to your next stage of information and lead even those who were not thinking of buying down a path of unavoidable interest.

Let the title of your presentation start the funnel at the widest point of appeal:
• Four steps to expanding your business
• How to get internet users to your website
• Massive Exposure, Minimum Expense
• Marketing your business on the internet this week
• What you can do now before your competition gets on internet
And it goes on an on according to your customers needs.

Now take that title, uncover the real needs of your customers and give them your solution in a seminar setting in a conference room or at a lunch you’ve invited them to. By educating them you put yourself in a position of expert and teach them something they probably didn’t know about your business. If you can make it valuable to them you have successfully put yourself in a position of reciprocation.

Reciprocation is a very powerful tool that creates a desire to “repay” a value that has been given. It’s the reason many businesses offer coupons for “free” items. How often will a customer really go in for free fries without buying the burger at the regular price? In this case the free item is your valuable information that has solved your customers need.

So there are a few things you’ll want to really examine
• What do my customers need to know to help themselves or their business?
• What is the best way to integrate the advantages of my product/service into this valuable information?
• What is the best way to present this information to your customer?

Let’s start with getting to know what your customers really want.
Product: To satisfy some perceived need
Service: To make their business grow.

I want to tack on an excellent case study in giving customers what they want from an interview with the CEO of Craigslist.com the classified ad site. Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster was recently interviewed on Marketplace for American Public Media by Kai Ryssdal and discussed how they don’t maximize profits rather focus on the “Social Good.”

Jim has been the CEO for eight years and was asked how an website that gets 10 Billion page views every month does not focus on profit?

“It’s more fun to us but we do have a healthy business and we are in the black but beyond that it’s not important to maximize the financial aspects. We charge for employment ads and brokered apartment ads in NY. We could put banner or text ads up but our experience with using other sites is that we don’t like them, they’re annoying, especially the ones that are on top of what you are trying to read or come sliding in.” said Jim.

Do others shake their heads at your missing revenue opportunities?
“During the Internet boom we could have sold to any number of companies but of course many of those companies are out of business today, and we’ve just chugged along and been profitable even though we didn’t set out to make money.” said Jim.

“Traffic views are 10 Billion a month and growing at 100 percent. We have 25 people and we add cities, adding another 120 in the next few months.”

Expansion is truly democratic in that they see where the most requests are coming from for a new city and use that to choose the expansion.

“It makes our lives simpler, we don’t sit around in a room trying to figure out how to conquer the world because we aren’t trying to figure out how to increase market share and have world dominance.” Says Jim but as Kai points out Craigslist has of course an enormous market share and very nearly “world dominance” in their area of online classified advertising.

“What better way to operate than to follow through with what your customers or users are asking for and block out everything else, much of what just takes away from what you should be doing which is trying to please your users and customers and the general public.”

In the next article we’ll talk about the best setting for this educational “seminar” and move into integrating your customers needs with the advantages of your product and service for the content of your educational seminar.