Defining the Sales Moment
The Sales Moment
The single, most memorable idea that tilts sales in your favor
Think about the last time you were delighted with a purchase. What was it – a new car? The kitchen remodel you’ve always wanted? What about a purchase for your business, like when you switched accounting companies, or bought a new CRM system, or moved to a new office?
Chances are you started to feel great about it, even before you made the purchase.
You experienced the most important thing in marketing: what brand marketers call The Sales Moment. To understand the sales moment, you first need to understand how people make buying decisions.
People Think In Pictures
We form a mental picture for all of our thoughts. For instance, if you think about what you had for breakfast, you’ll picture it: a banana, or a bowl of granola and yogurt, or bacon and eggs. Memories are mental pictures, but so are our desires, hopes, and dream.
If you think about where you want to take your next vacation, you’ll picture the ideal spot. It won’t be words, but an actual image of where you’re going or what you’re doing.
The same holds true for shopping, whether it’s a consumer product, technology or a service. You will have a strong mental picture picture of what you want or what success looks like.
For a CRM system, it might be:
“I need to be able to see a list of my top prospects and where they are in the sales funnel with one click. I want it to be simple and not have too much information that I don’t need. I need to be able to easily contact prospects and have messages tracked.”
Or a remodeling project:
“I got burned the last time I did a project. The contractor didn’t do anything on time. He kept making promises he didn’t keep. I need someone who stays on schedule.”
Or an accounting firm:
“I need someone who is used to working with growing businesses. I don’t want to be a big fish in a small pond, but I want someone who knows what it takes to go from 5 to 150 employees.”
Everyone has the ideal product or solution in mind when they start shopping. Which leads us to the next part of the sales moment.
It Solves Your Problem
The ideal product or service actually solved your problem. It wasn’t just a list of features and benefits, which is hard to understand and compare to other options – it was something you could wrap your brain around before you got into the details. Because you could visualize the solution, and the product or service aligned with that, you were attracted to it from the start. Then once you made the purchase and what you were told about it matched your experience, you were delighted because it did the next important thing about a sales moment.
It Fulfills Its Promise
There’s nothing worse than when you were told a product did something, only to find out it doesn’t. Marketers have learned over the years that if you don’t fulfill your promise, you can’t get the sales growth or long term customer relationships that you need. So when you were happy with a purchase, it’s because it didn’t solve your problem in the short term, but keeps delivering for you for as long as you need it.
The Sales Moment Defined
Merge these attributes together and you have the sales moment, that is – the single most important idea that tilts sales in your favor. In an age where people make decisions in a blink, it’s more important than ever that the first impression is a lasting impression – one that can only come from a unique idea, expressed in a mental picture, that shows the prospect you can deliver.
This is the core of our brand marketing methodology – working with clients to first listen to why their customers chose them, the define a sales moment and how to express it.
The benefits of owning a single idea that tilts sales in your favor are tremendous.
First, you have a simple, compelling message that you can use to introduce your company to prospects. Whether it’s an elevator pitch, a core message on your web site, or a theme in your capabilities presentations, you have moved from echoing everyone in your market, to giving a reason for prospects to listen. If you use this theme over and over again, you remind prospects of the value of your products and services, and also give them a reason to listen.
Second, you can make sure your sales team is on-message. Consider how often sales people struggle with articulating a value proposition. Sometimes it might have high-minded buzzwords that seem unnatural in speech or writing, other times it’s just a statement of the services that your company provides. Regardless, if it’s not clear and compelling, you risk losing prospects’ attention within seconds.
Sales people can be much more effective if they are operating from a playbook – a messaging framework that includes your sales moment as well as how you can communicate what you do better than your competition.
Third, it’s easier for clients to refer you. When your clients know what you stand for and can clearly communicate that, they can make better connections through their network for you. We all know that referrals are the best source of new business, because someone the prospect trusts has made a recommendation. The question you should ask yourself is: how can you help your client make a strong recommendation?
In other words, how do you go from a lukewarm recommendation such as “You should call this company, they do good work…” to “The experience this company had in our industry meant I knew the project would be successful. It was a big project that was risky, but they showed us how they had delivered just what we needed.”
This increases the likelihood the prospect will reach out to you, and also has the benefit of giving you a leg up on the competition, even before you start.
Last, this will help you close more sales. You are simply giving prospects a better reason to value your services and to choose your company.
Give us a call at 703-579-6864 if you want to talk more about how you can grow your sales.