You may have bought a list of names, emails and addresses. Salivating at the opportunity to sell, it can be enticing to use direct mail or email to immediately pitch the massive number of people. After all, a few sales may justify the interruption. Big numbers can translate into some sales. Or more likely, it may not. That old method of interruption marketing was for a different world and time. Even if you did get some sales, at what cost did it have on your brand? Consider the following:
- Your brand = spam. Whether it’s an email, cold call or anything else that is intrusive yet irrelevant, if you are selling, you have just lowered what people think of your company and products. Their association has become tainted with spam. Don’t be surprised if they filter you out.
- You don’t get a second chance. Now that you are perceived as someone who is merely trying to sell, you could be tuned out and avoided. It makes people feel uncomfortable. You approached them creating high tension in a low trust relationship.
- You built nothing. The desperation of selling wastes the opportunity to build something that is strategic and continuous pipeline of business. It’s merely transactional and fleeting as well as a waste of time.
Put bluntly, you are selling and we hate to be sold. We have choices today and people caught selling miss the buyer.
If you can focus instead on marketing from the inside out, then a strategy can emerge that helps buyers naturally want to engage. It takes much more work, but the rewards are that your buyer feels comfortable and wants to engage your brand. Inside out marketing means:
- Starting with process. Before doing anything outbound, think through every part of the experience a buyer will have emotionally. Lead them with what is valuable at the right time and in the right way.
- Delineating steps. Know the mindset and mind shifts that your buyer transitions between and ensure each stage is managed well. If your buyer is seeking to get educated, then don’t start proposing solutions. Help them with understanding the problem instead. When someone transitions with understanding, then relevant content and engagement should be used.
- Build assets first. It takes a lot of work to build value. But with the high cost of simply blasting people who don’t want to be sold, set up the assets they can take advantage of. It may mean working for the next several weeks before even approaching your customers. It’s a system and systems have to be built, tested and deployed.
Once your inside process is working, your outside engagement needs to be married to it in a seamless fashion. Study the sequencing and watch how true prospects move through each stage. The feedback will help you continually refine how your inside marketing works to take advantage of your outside marketing.
Are you at a loss for how to engage your market? What if you build such a system from the inside out first?
