Sell the Next Step (and Nothing Else)!
By Jonathan Kranz
In many B2B sales, you have to take the prospect for a long walk before you arrive at the close. Too often, we sell the destination prematurely; when our end point is a multi-million dollar sale, we’re asking the prospect to do the equivalent of climbing a mountain.
In the long sales cycle, what we really want to do is encourage one step. Then another. Followed by another. One step is a much easier thing to ask of a prospect. And if this process is done artfully enough, prospects will arrive at the destination – the close – as if they had naturally strolled there by themselves.
A lesson from bricks and mortar
Today, most retail stores on a city street are built with their store fronts parallel to the sidewalk. But many older stores have a kind of open air vestibule, an indentation between the sidewalk and the door that allows you to see merchandise in displays to your left and right.
More importantly, these vestibules serve as transition zones. On any mild day in New York City, you’ll see retail employees sitting outside on top of ladders, overlooking racks of merchandise – clothes, books – displayed tantalizingly in these zones. If you’re walking by, you might wander over to take a look. Wow, 50% off! You pick through a couple of things. You peak through the doorway and see even more stuff that you might like. Suddenly, almost without realizing it, you’re on the other side of that door.
And there’s the magic! No thinking, no deciding was involved. It just…kind of happened. In retail, one of the hardest challenges is moving pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the store. These transition zones are important because they lure customers without forcing them to stop and think about coming inside.
So what does this have to do with copy?
Everything. You want to turn your communications into virtual transition zones. Think about your next ad, your next e-mail, your next website home page. Instead of using the real estate to sell your company (“Numbusall, Inc. provides an enterprise-wide corporate accountability solution…”), sell the next step:
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“Download our free e-book, Ready for 2007? The Five Most Misunderstood SEC Regulations – and How to Prepare for Them”
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“Participate in our leaders-only virtual roundtable, Compliance: Chaos vs. Control...”
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“Request a personalized accountability audit that will expose your most urgent vulnerabilities...”
Yup, you recognize this technique: these are offers. They’re a promise of something in exchange for the prospect’s time and attention (or contact info or a phone call or a face-to-face meeting and so on). With each step, the prospect doesn’t have to decide whether or not they’re interested in your $6M solution; they just have to express interest in a low-risk, low-obligation offer. An easy step to take.
The key thing is to sell the step – why it benefits the recipient – and resist the temptation to talk about the company, the product or the service. Hold your fire and focus on the offer. Why the white paper is worth reading. Why the webinar is a “must-attend” event. How the audit will save thousands of dollars, instantly.
Do this, and suddenly you’ll be generating meaningful responses from qualified leads – people interested in the issues your company addresses. Let your competition foam at the mouth about how great they are. In the meantime, you’ll be the one engaged in conversations with the people your competition failed to reach.
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Kranz Communications
(781) 620-1154
This article originally appeared in the Kranz On Copy newsletter. To subscribe, click here.
