How to Effectively Engage Your Target Market (Must-Have Sales Conversations – Part 4 of 8)

Conversation #4 is all about making sure you’ve developed strategies that make you confident in attracting and engaging your ideal customers.

In the last vlog, we considered questions that enable us to be smarter with our targeting but that’s only half the battle. You need to figure out how you are going to attract and engage these ideal customers to talk to you about working together. Nearly every salesperson tells me “If I could just get more meetings, I would be so much more successful.”

I accept that the ideal world is a never-ending stream of inbound leads that are already sold on you and what you sell, but there’s not a lot of salespeople or small business owners living in that ideal world.

As a salesperson or small business owner you need to understand and respect that there’s a big difference between sales and marketing and like it or not, most of us need to be good at both, if we want to achieve meaningful sales growth.

This conversation requires us to put on our marketer thinking cap. People need to know you, like you, need you and trust you if you want to attract them and engage them.

First, start with the customer in mind and identify the major problem or problems you solve for the person you want the meeting with. The more you focus your outbound marketing on the problems you solve the more likely it is you’ll get the attention of the people you want to speak to. Whether it’s an outbound call, a blog or article you share on social or an email you’re sending to your target market the key is to succinctly communicate the problem you could be solving for the person you want to speak to.

Once you have your problem or problems identified consider how you can ethically use influence strategies as part of your engagement and attraction strategy.

As an example, can you use reciprocity? What do you have, or could you create that would enable you to offer value to the people you want to be speaking to?

Can you use authority? Is there a statistic you could share, an expert you could quote, a customer case study or something else that would present you as having valuable expertise in solving problems for the people you want to speak to?

Dr. Robert Cialdini identified 6 core influence principles and if you’re not considering each of them it’s likely your making engaging and attracting harder than it needs to be.

Next, consider what the most efficient AND effective medium for engaging your ideal target customer is going to be. I can acknowledge email is a very efficient way to communicate with thousands of prospects and once but if you’re not getting reads or responses then it’s not effective.

A good place to start is back at Conversation # 3. In the analysis of customers, you won in the past 12 months I asked you to consider where the lead came from. If there’s a common theme on what’s working that’s a great place to focus.

Consider your existing customers. What are the referral opportunities they offer and what’s the best way to systematically activate referrals to other ideal target customers?

Consider whether there are partners and third parties that could connect you with your ideal target market but once again make sure the strategy is likely to be effective.

Consider whether there are places or events your ideal target customer congregate, where you would have an opportunity to engage them in a meaningful way. Once again, if you sell to Dentists, it seems efficient to attend a Dentist conference but that will only be effective if you get the opportunity to engage Dentists in a manner that leads to meetings following the conference.

And please don’t ignore outbound campaigns that include getting on the phone. I can appreciate this is the engagement strategy most of us like to avoid but I’ve been involved in enough successful outbound campaigns recently to know that in many environments this is still very efficient and very effective. As a big hint, outbound will only ever be as effective as your analysis of the problems you solve and opportunities to leverage ethical influence strategies.

To sum all of this up, the question to get this conversation started is “What’s the MOST persuasive, efficient and effective way to attract and engage my ideal customers?”

In the next Vlog we’ll move on to conversation # 5 and consider opportunities to increase the number of solution confirmations, decrease the number of quotes and improve our overall conversion rates in a customer-centric manner. If you missed the previous vlogs, check them out here:

1. The Ultimate Guide to Plan Your Sales Kick-Off!

2. 8 Must-Have Conversations at Your Sales Kick-Off

3. How to Find Your Purpose and Achieve Your Sales Goals (Part 1 of 8)

4. How to Grow Revenue from Existing Customers (Part 2 of 8)

5. 5 Strategies for Smarter Sales Targeting (Part 3 of 8)

And remember, if you’re doing a major kick off, please speak to my team about having me along as a conference presenter.

If you’re an individual salesperson or have a small sales team come along to our Sales Kick Off event on February 12th. All the details are on the website and there’s even a competition to win over $12000 worth of sales training.

Here’s to a better sales life and a better kick off for you and your people.