Between The Buyer’s Doubt And Readiness

We live in a low trust world that is overloaded with options. Your buyers are buried in information and their guards are up. As a buyer yourself, you can understand. After all, you have experienced unmet expectations, overblown salesmanship and avoidable failure. Thus, unless the pain is very high, buyers have their guards up and have doubt when dealing with new brands.

The gap between the doubt that buyers have in their buying process and their eventual desire to do business with you is a vital area which marketing bridges. Effective inbound marketing builds trust with a doubtful buyer and helps them become ready to take a next step. To fill this gap, your marketing has to focus on nurturing the buyer until they feel ready to take a decisive step to buy. Nurturing is about building relationship and trust. Here’s what it looks like:

• Your name becomes recognizable. Think about how many names are in someone’s inbox. If you have enough frequency and relevance without being dismissed, then your brand takes up real estate in the mind of the buyer. This is valuable real estate which is hard to claim and must be developed.
• Your relevance increases. As buyers work and seek to solve problems, your brand and message helps to clarify what the problem they are feeling is about. You become associated with their pain.
• You are perceived as valuable. Effective nurturing means that you are associated in the mind of the buyer with their acute pain points of interest. It also means that you provide value first by offering helpful pathways to dealing with their problems.
• You are viewed as an expert. Because you know the problem, discuss it precisely, share ways to solve the buyer’s pain and do it repeatedly with proof, you are viewed as an expert. We like to buy from experts, less so from salespeople.

In the beginning, you are not recognized. Your relevance is low. You are not valuable nor perceived as an expert. You have to gain permission to be able to tell your story and exchange value early in order to do so.

Nurturing is the hard, but rewarding process that builds a relationship of trust in the right sequence, timing and sensitivity. If you only have a sales process where you are taking orders or are waiting to close a new lead, then it’s a difficult way to sell when there are so many choices, especially with today’s buyer mindsets.

Try nurturing and creating a systematic, personal way to connect and bring value.

What would that mean for your buyers?