I’m really excited about the changes I see in the business world. More and more businesses are realizing that the key to long term relationships is to act from a core belief that customers matter, not just their wallets. They seek to make an emotional connection with their customers, to give them a memorable experience.
Renee Miller and Bill Williams of The Miller Group put on a free webinar yesterday for the Los Angeles Region of the California SBDC. In their excellent presentation, “Connective Marketing: A Culture of Intimacy,” they presented both figures and stories to reinforce their message: marketing is changing radically. Whereas fads come and go quickly, this change will spread and become stronger because people want to make connections. They want the approach soft sell salespeople and marketers use, a way of doing business that respects prospects and involves them in developing solutions to fit them. For the soft sell salesperson, sales are fun, fulfilling and mutually [...]
Stop wasting your time, effort, and money trying to sell to the whole world. It takes discipline to train yourself to narrow your efforts to your best effect. I too have to discipline myself: soft sell sales and soft sell marketing appeal mostly to small business owners and people who care about developing long term relationships. Yet we find it tempting to be available to anyone and everyone who might want to buy our products. We don’t want to miss out on any sale. The whole world is our oyster. Not so.
The people who thrive are those who identify their niche and tightly focus on what they do that appeals to that specific group. That’s why I strongly encourage everyone in soft sell sales and soft sell marketing to determine your ideal customer profile. Prospects who match that have the greatest likelihood of wanting and feeling they need your products and services because such problems are common to people and companies like your best customers. Help customers buy because it works for them. You’ll find your sales more fun and the results mutually [...]
Congratulations, Judith & Jim, on an incredibly successful email campaign to get The Heart of Marketing: Love Your Customers and They Will Love You Back (Morgan James Publishing) to hit #59 on Amazon overall (which means that only 58 books sold better than it.) You truly demonstrated the impact a well orchestrated campaign can have if you have the involvement of lots of friends and people who care about your work — and if you give those supporters the tools and the reminders to make it easy to share news.
But all of the good marketing efforts will fall flat if they are wasted on people who have no interest in what you are offering. The fact that The Heart of Marketing http://TheHeartofMarketing.com soared to the top in so many categories is reassuring because I long believed the way to sell and market was the soft sell approach. Still for years I felt insecure about my decision. After all, the top trainers in sales and marketing when I was starting out pushed the value of hard sell techniques. But when I used those techniques, I did not feel good about myself. I want to help customers buy. [...]
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