Making friends with your prospects will help you to sell to them and to increase the return on investment of your sales and marketing teams. After all, people do business with the people they like, and they’re also more likely to recommend your company to other people if you’ve taken the time to build a relationship with them.
Of course, making friends with your prospects is easier said than done, especially when they know that you have an ulterior motive. But there are ways to get around that, especially if you’re investing in content marketing and providing people with value in the form of blog posts, videos, ebooks, whitepapers and other pieces of content in exchange for their attention in the first place.
But there’s more that you can do if you’re determined to befriend your prospects and to make the kind of impact that they’ll never forget. Simply providing content or giving them something of value in exchange for permission to talk to them is only the beginning. Everyone can do that – which is why everyone’s already doing it.
Making friends
Dale Carnegie, the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, famously said that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. Simply saying people’s names when you talk to them can help you to make an impact and to connect on a personal level, but it’s also a basic example of personalisation.
Personalisation is the art and science of tailoring your messaging based on who you’re talking to, and most of us are already doing that to a certain extent. For sales teams, personalisation can be made much easier through the use of tools like customer relationship management (CRM) platforms which allow them to store data on prospects and to use this in their conversations. For example, perhaps your sales team could store the names of prospects’ children or begin a call by recapping what was talked about last time.
If you want people to like you – and thus to buy from you – then you need to treat them as people. In other words, you should take a step back from your day-to-day processes and remind yourself that there’s a human being on the other end. As soon as you treat sales like a process or a guaranteed formula to follow, it starts to deliver diminishing returns. Instead, treat prospects like friends and just try to help them. If you can help them by selling them your product or service, so much the better.
Conclusion
Whether we like it or not, people will always prefer to do business with people who know them and who remember them. That’s why we still like the personal touch that we get from small businesses even when it costs more to use their services and other options like Amazon and Walmart are more convenient. It can help you to punch above your weight and to compete against companies ten times your size. So what are you waiting for?
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.