One of the things we talk about a lot here at Cirrus Insight is what sales professionals can do with the time we create for them.
We think that time can best be spent reinvesting in yourself and learning tactics that can improve your overall sales performance. (Who doesn’t like making extra money?)
But the Internet is loaded with tactics, courses, webinars, books, and other educational content.
So getting started down that road can be a challenge.
What follows are some of the tactics I shared with sales professionals who joined our most recent Email Blast Webinar.
Using any one of these tactics will immediately improve your sales outreach efforts. But using all of them will 10X your outreach efforts if you put the time and effort in to implement them.
And with all the time Cirrus Insight saves you by eliminating manual data entry, making appointment scheduling a breeze, and seeing what your prospects are interested in, and what they’re not, you’ll have plenty of time to implement these tactics.
What tactics you choose to use are going to be defined by your sales persona. We can’t
stress enough how important researching your customer is before you try any of this.
Think about it like this: How do you save money at the grocery store? You can go in and just grab whatever you, or your kids, want on the shelves. That would be an expensive trip. Or. You can go into the grocery store with a list and know exactly what you need and where to find it.
Targeting your sales persona is no different than having that list from the grocery store.
If your product can’t, don’t bother those people. Everyone’s busy. Places to be. You know the drill.
But if your product legitimately solves their problem, and does so in such a way that’s easy to understand, easier to use, and won’t break the bank? Then by all means, pitch away!
A Pro-Tip: What customers care about most is price, speed, and convenience. Branding is important. So is trying to achieve a loft mission, like giving every sales professional 20% of their day back.
But don’t fall into the trap of thinking any customer or company has brand loyalty. They don’t. Customers only care about whether or not your product can solve their problem easier, faster, and more efficiently than the competition. And if it can’t, then you need to make sure other aspects of the business are 10X better than the competition’s, such as your customer service and educational offerings.
That is, unless …
Your goal is to have prospects know you, like you, and trust you.
But what does that even mean?!
For sales professionals, it means the difference between a cold prospect and a warm one. The more time a prospect spends with you, the product, and your company, the warmer they get.
The 7 Hour Rule refers to a number of different theories of attention, and offers a unified hypothesis to sales and marketing professionals. A hypothesis that says, a prospect needs to spend 7 hours worth of time to get warmed up to you and ready to buy.
If you can successfully get a prospect to spend seven hours worth of time with you, then you’ll have begun to establish the kind of brand loyalty or product loyalty that marketers like to talk about.
It’s only after they’ve gone through the seven hours that a prospect will potentially forgive your products shortcomings, or higher price point, because they’ve emotionally invested in you.
(If you think this is a fluff, you can find the seven hour rule across all walks of life, including dating. You need to spend, cumulatively, seven hours with someone before your mind decides if it likes someone enough to date them.)
To the surprise of nobody, the answer is content marketing. But don’t worry. Content marketing isn’t this magic, expensive thing you need to hire a fancy consultant to do for you.
Here’s all you, Mrs. and Mr. Sales Professional, need to know about any content you’re going to create for your prospects: Content is good only when it shows someone how to quickly and easily solve a problem they have using your product.
Use the acronym SSTH: As long as you keep the solution to your customer’s problems simple, specific, timely, and honest, they will grow to know, like, and trust you.
Something that continues to be underutilized in social media, as well as sales, is video replies: So, take advantage of this opportunity and respond to people using video. This is something you can do on most platforms now because most platforms want you to upload video. Why? Because all they care about is keeping people on their platform. A video reply does just that while also increasing the amount of time a prospect spends with you.
You know what’s crazy?
It’s 2022, and people still don’t take email seriously. That’s despite the fact that 96% of consumers check their email every day and 4.037 billion email users on the planet. Email is not dead.
And with social media algorithmic tomfoolery, email is still the best, most reliable, and consistent way to reach prospects. Real talk for a minute? Email is the best, most reliable, and consistent way to reach anyone on this planet.
The technology that allows email to operate is embedded in every device, even the most basic ones. So learning how to send email properly is going to be more important, not less, as time goes on.
That’s where a product like Cirrus Insight can come. (Did we mention that we offer a risk-free 14-day trial? No credit card required. Just give it a whirl.)
What follows is everything I know about email marketing presented in a short list:
Wow. We covered a lot here, huh? If you have any marketing questions, you can always reach me at BJMendelson@CirrusInsight.com and I’m happy to answer them here on this blog.
Until then, why don’t you give that free Cirrus Insight trial a whirl and then use the time we save you to put these tacts into practice?