Content Led Selling in My Front Office

We all know business isn’t like it used to be – more competition, more demanding customers, and less interest in our marketing.  These all stem from the Internet.

• Nowadays customers are more informed and more able to decide for themselves what they want.  Old style power selling won’t work when the customer knows more than the sales guy.

• Competition isn’t limited to businesses in the same town anymore.  Anybody can do business anywhere.  Our customers can find our competitors and vice versa.

• Prospects have less time and are less open to interrupt marketing.  Cold calls on the phone, door knocking, email blasts, snail mail brochures, networking – they all get us nowhere.

So what’s a guy to do?  We still have to find people who need what we do, so they can pay us for doing it.  My answer is Content Led Sales, but that’ll need some explanation.  It’s a development on the concept of consulting led sales, adapting lessons learned from article marketing.

Consulting led sales worked well for us in the 90′s.  We’d understand the prospects issues, define the requirement, explain how we’d use our resources to deliver that requirement and our experience to manage the client’s risk.  The big advantage of the approach was it moved the conversation on from the product features/price comparison.  The problem today with consulting led sales is access. If we can’t get to meet and engage the client we have no way of understanding the requirement.

Article Marketing – with articles attracting visitors to a site, where we’re displaying adverts – solves the problem of access.  Visitors come to the site for information in the articles and get to see our targeted adverts.  The limitations are a) this can be horribly expensive and unproductive at the same time and b) most people have an aversion to clicking sponsored ads.  They’re searching the web for genuine insight, not adverts.

Content Led Sales combines both concepts, using articles published in web pages to answer generic customer issues and demonstrate how the associated product can be implemented to address them.

Lets look at a simple example, based on some personal experience of mine.

Some years ago I spent time working as a Caddie at Royal Dornoch Golf Club.  The experience taught me a great deal about how golfers of different abilities could get the most enjoyment from their round.  Obviously a twenty five year old scratch player would want different challenges to those sought by a seventy year old senior.

In my example of Content Led Sales I could write a series of blog posts about the course, the experience, the history, with some fun stories, and sell a download of my Caddie notes the player could carry with him/her on the course.

There are some interesting benefits to the customer:

1. They can anticipate their round with some fun reading.
2. They can get expert guidance tailored to their abilities during the round.
3. They can rent a cart with GPS yardage calculator and save the $75  regular Caddie fee.
4. They’d have something to add to their photos and other souvenirs for a richer memory of their round.

Convinced?

I am.  I’d better start writing those Caddie notes and take the photos.

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• Content Led Sales and the Battle of Ideas (stevensreeves.posterous.com)

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Tagged as: Business, Consulting, Content Led Sales, Internet marketing, Sales