Infotainment wins the opportunity to sell

Infotainment captures buyers’ attention – it’s different to all that dry benefits marketing speak.

Amusing and informing at the same time. That’s the winning strategy for today’s content led selling.

There was a time when the sales rep‘s first responsibility was knowing new jokes, and who to share them with. This customer would laugh like a drain at an off colour story where others would take offence.

Jokes were an essential part of the sales call, amusing the buyer for a few minutes and buying the right to inform him of the new ? – whatever the pitch was that week.
Somehow we lost the plot.

Jokes, along with cigarettes and alcohol lunches are no longer part of the customer engagement process. We’re all too busy, being dreadfully busy.

But when it comes to content based selling we maybe need to think about the way things used to be and get back to Infotainment.

We don’t knock doors anymore, or organise regular calls, or even build relationships with prospects. They choose when they want to buy what and who from. And they mostly do that on the Internet.

Good news for those of us who understand and work to accommodate the new way of doing things. We can build blogs explaining in lots of ways how our solution solves problems for people just like our buyers.

But in today’s world it’s all happening too fast. Nobody has time to read academic treatise on the details. They just want the meat, in 30 seconds or less.

If we’re going to buy the right to make our pitch we have to do more – introduce a little entertainment so we can deliver the information. That’s infotainment based selling.

It’s why we’re seeing so much multimedia in blogs. It’s why we’re using cartoons in our web sites. It’s why Facebook is growing like crazy while traditional media is dying on the vine.

So here’s my recipe for infotainment sales strategy in 2010.

We have to be on-line and found where buyers are looking.

Search engines are the way they find us.

Content in web pages is how we deliver our sales messages.

Infotainment is how we buy the right to present our offer.

Just to avoid any confusion, this post isn’t about Internet Marketing. It’s about how we sell regular products and services. The old ways don’t work anymore.