Leverage Sales and Marketing: Offers

Featured Person: Chad Root, Spearhead Sales and Marketing, President/Founder

How Salespeople Should Think About Offers

CR: I’m Chad with Spearhead and thanks for joining me again. We’re going to dive into what we really call the meat and the potatoes of our “Relationship Machine”. Salespeople, this is for you! I’ve been at this for over 25 years and have been in all types of selling environments. The main concept to realize is marketing in 2015-2016 is much different than 10 to 20 years ago. There are so many tools at our disposal and as salespeople you may or may not have a marketing department, but you need to leverage these things. At this point, we’ve gone through strategy, focused on positioning, brand personality, and you now have a plan. As salespeople, we have been given the assignment of the three C’s (Companies, contacts, and contracts). We’ve gone through the basics of contact management and from there the next piece of the puzzle is offers.
How Offers Affect Your Company Trajectory
Think about your company’s trajectory. If a person comes on board, they’ve bought into your positioning and you’ve shown them an opportunity or threat in the future. Let’s now look at your follow-up system. Let’s say you met this person, how to do you stay in touch and follow-up and with what offer? From a nurturing view, how do you stay relevant and provide value? You want them to take steps to follow you. Build trust, try-it, team up, depend on each other, and finally advocate for each other. We know we need to develop relationship phases, but how do we do it?

Offers Defined in Four Steps

The idea of an offer I can explain in four steps:

1. Information/Training – Provides value as a way to stay in touch and offer something to the marketplace for the first time. Very valuable.
2. Products/Services – Includes a free sample or free trial.
3. Engagement – This includes open houses, competitions, meetings. Interaction with your potential client.
4. Updated – Has anything changed with your company’s vision or approach? Any leadership changes or facility moves?

Offers and the Relationship Process

I’m going to come back to the relationship process. Not all offers are equally effective at each step in the relationship. You need to think about your database and create your offers based on which stage the people are in. So if my offer made a good first impression, people will take advantage of it. What do you do then, how do you take it to the next step? That would be to build trust. The best way to build trust is to base an offer factual information. Use third-party acknowledged and people that have high ranking credentials to help with validation. Another thing you may do is to show them a way to get to the opportunity or avoid a future threat. Case studies are a prime example of a way to build trust. After this step, we now want our client to give it a try, which is called a trial offer. It could be a one-off project or a special onboard program. If that goes well, you could then provide more value in the form of training. If you make it to training, your client believes in what you bring to the table and will be more open to listen and try new ideas.

After the trial offer, you get to the depend on each other bucket. You start to think what can I offer to a client that I interact with all the time? How do we provide more value and make the process easier? Early pay discounts, instant reorders, and bundling orders are now transactional benefits of reaching this level. The last step is advocacy. Together you hold mutual open houses, support each other (differing agendas), and show allegiance through editorials. Both companies benefit through work together in which you use this as a live case study.

Notes

• Marketing has changed A LOT in 10 years.
• YouTube, Blogs, marketing automation, SEO, digital ads, mobile apps, eBlasts, LinkedIn, Facebook, Houzz, Pinterest, etc. didn’t exist ten years ago.
• When you help a buyer see an opportunity or threat in their future (Their Trajectory), you’ll get their attention.
• Prior to someone doing business with you, how can you add value as you follow up with them? We call that nurturing.
• Strategic buyers continue taking steps with partners they can relate to, team-up with and depend on.
• These 4 categories and a full list of ideas are available at Spearhead Free Idea Starter.
• Pair offers to the relationship stage in order to add value and give reasons to take the next step.
• Salespeople can now follow-up with existing and new contacts that are engaging with their company’s offers.

Conclusion:

With that said, these are the three things I wanted to transfer to you today. The first step is to view the relationship as a trajectory. Each step along the way is paired with an offer that allows the contacts inside and outside of your database, something to grab onto. Next, you’ll host that offer on your website and use your technology to track contact behaviors and offer effectiveness. Lastly, you’ll promote your offer through direct/indirect marketing. Salespeople, imagine coming to work Monday morning and getting a report of new contacts that are actively engaging in your offers. Those are the leads you want and you will be able to follow-up with.

Your contacts don’t want you to just “check in”. They want you to bring them opportunity and avoid problems. We call that an “Offer”. It gives purpose to your brand and a real reason for salespeople to follow-up. Thanks for watching and you can contact us at info@spearheadsalesmarketing.com.