How To Win The New Age Buyer

 

If you ask any marketer or sales person the question – Have your prospective buyers or existing customers changed?  The spontaneous response will be a BIG YES!

Buyers today are in the driver’s seat, and more empowered with the gadgets and tools at their disposal. Moreover, they expect it to provide unique and personalized interactions to help find directions and navigate the path smoothly to reach their destination.

There’s no point negating the fact that today’s buyers have more control over the sale than they ever have before.

Moreover, they:

• Are less tolerant of information being pushed on them but like to seek for it at their pace
• Are demanding more flexibility in your approach
• Are pressed for time
• Want everything, but don’t necessarily want to pay for it
• Want more for less (money, time and effort)
• Are ready to seek recommendation from peers, friends or social networking sites than purely rely on advertising
• Are annoyed with unsolicited calls from vendors
• Are not shy about expressing their displeasure or dissatisfaction via multiple channels
• Are vary that a wrong decision will cost them their job/ credibility/ waste their time and money.

The well informed buyers does not care or have interest in you, your company, your references or success stories, or even your products/solutions – unless it impacts their business objectives, market share,  profitability, or overall success.

In short, buyers today buy for their purpose – not ours.

In order to catch your buyer’s attention and compete today, you must understand that your priority is to change completely the context of how you and your product/ solution and organization are seen by a prospective customer and that means – speaking their language.

As an exercise, list out your valuable clients or ideal buyers (if you do not have a customer yet). Then think about everything you know about them. For example, do you know:

• What their business objectives are in 2015?
• Are they expanding or downsizing?
• What are the new product or services they are coming up with in 2015?
• Are any products/ solutions of theirs being phased out?
• How are they performing vis-à-vis their peers (up, down or static)?
• Did they make a profit last year?
• What would stand in the way of meeting their goals?
• How does this problem affect their – Bottomline? Productivity? Profitability? Sales? Production? Customer Satisfaction? On-time deliveries? Quality?
• If they do not fix this problem this year, what is the potential financial impact on their business? What are other difficulties they will face in the future? Can they afford to take that risk?

You also, need to find out two things before working with a potential client:

• Can you establish a Need for your product/service and if yes, are they a good match for your company?
• Do they have a budget and when would they like to start?

Buyers today, are research-savvy, connected, social, mobile, and in-the-know. To cater to this new age buyer, you need to:

• actively listening to their needs,
• putting their needs ahead of yours.
• maintain a presence across relevant channels and networks,
• provide helpful content (in diverse formats) that they can consume at their pace.

By doing your homework, you can skillfully point out glaring gaps in their business. This helps you gain an invitation to help them better understand a precise issue before you ever try to sell them your product/ solution.

You can build a genuine rapport by giving them chance to know what you stand for and like you. By

• listening to them and understanding their personal motivations,
• demonstrating your knowledge and understanding of their situation and problems,
• sharing responsibility for taking business risks.

By consistently and efficiently communicating:

• How can you make their job easier?
• How can this solution make them more competitive in the marketplace?
• How can you help them save, gain, reduce, increase or improve?

You get perceived as someone who cares about them and is sincerely interested in providing a custom solution and not just seeking a sale, and they channel their emotions to guide your discussion.

You can win the new age buyer, by bring your expertise, guide the conversations, collect information, and involve your customers – to the extent they want – to build, review, and agree on a solution.

Look forward to your views and learn from your experience.

Photo Credit: Pixabay

Innovatus Marketers Touchpoint LLP is a customer experience, marketing, service design, design thinking and business innovation consulting firm, based in India. We offer go-to-market and digital strategy consulting and help our clients rethink and redesign customer and employee value in the digital era. We offer design thinking workshops and consulting, tailored to enable, accelarete or transform your business. We are laser-focused on the problem at hand and your opportunity space, and optimize process to make design thinking and service design principles accessible to your employees who’ve never done it before or stuck-up, and provide “just adequate” theory to help you get moving and achieve outcomes.

You may reach out to Vidya Priya Rao @ +918080015500 or email @ vidyapriya.rao@marketerstouchpoint.com

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