Posts Tagged ‘sales pitches’

The words you choose to communicate your message matter. You need to pick the right words for your intended audience. You may have heard that you need to dumb down your language for a universal audience. Well maybe, but that is not what I am talking about here. It doesn’t matter if you speak like a Harvard professor or a first-grader, if you use words that your intended audience doesn’t relate to, you’re sunk.

Don’t Cuss at Church

Imagine you have a chance to give your message in front of a church audience. You go ahead and get up there and give your normal speech, which just happens to be laced with expletives and graphic imagery. How well do you think you will get your message across? Not very.

Adapt to Your Audience

You need to adapt what you say to your audience. In the case of your business, your audience is your ideal customer. Lets say that you sell technological solutions to small businesses. There is a pretty good chance that this set of customers, small business owners, is not all that well-versed in techno-speak. If you try to speak to them in your own language, the one you use when conversing with fellow geeks, you simply won’t make any sense to them. You need to change your words, use stories and examples, and perhaps talk real slow.

Its Your Fault

If you ever find yourself loosing patience with a customer for not keeping up or not understanding what you are saying, take a deep breath and consider that it may be you who is at fault. If you don’t take the time to change your words so that the customer can better understand you, then you should not expect them to be able to keep up.

Useless Information

There is a pervasive problem of businesses using their own key words and jargon in their marketing and sales pitches. Here’s a classic example, and forgive me if I get the technical terminology wrong. If you are selling a computer, you are likely to talk about the memory in technical terms. You might say that a computer has 3 gigs of memory. In the sales pitch, this will just roll off your tongue and you will think nothing of it. You know what it means. Its part of your every day speech. However, your customer doesn’t have a clue what it means. When you say it and move on, a customer who doesn’t understand is forced to file it the drawer in their mind which is labeled “useless information.”

If you recognize that what you are saying isn’t understandable to your customer, you can change the way you say it. Instead of talking about gigs, you can tell the family-man looking to buy a computer how many pictures and videos he could store on it. Likewise, you could tell the business-woman how many documents and Power Points she could store. Change your words so that they make sense to customers.

Learn to Relate

You want to be able to relate to your customers. You can be the most affable person in the world, but if you use words that don’t make sense, you will never achieve this. Instead, get to know your ideal customer and learn how they talk, what they think about on a daily basis, and what they are likely to understand.

I read a great article the other day called I Don’t Talk to Clients About Social Media Anymore, by Edward Boches. In this article, Edward talks about how people don’t relate to the terms that we relate to. Instead of talking about Twitter, social networking, and blogging, all terms that can scare away the uninitiated, he suggests talking about things that businesses already understand and then relating them to social media.

Make Them Comfortable

That is a great way to still get your point across. Just change your terminology and find ways to relate what you are saying with what your customers already know. People don’t tread far from their comfort zone. Your job as a small business is to find a way to make them comfortable buying from you. Using the right words can make all of the difference.

photo credit: dno1967

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com

Having an email newsletter is a very good idea. It is a way to stay in conversation with customers and prospects very inexpensively. You can use it to build trust over time, educate and inform, and turn leads into customers. That being said, there are a few rules you need to follow.

Keep Selling to a Minimum

If you have a goal to connect with customers and prospects and to build trust through conversation, you need to keep your sales pitches to a minimum in your newsletter. There are exceptions to this. You could offer a newsletter that was all discounts and special offers, all the time. If people like your product, they will like that.

For the most part though, if you have a traditional small business, you only have a few things to sell and/or are not discounting constantly. What you need to focus on with your newsletter is your knowledge and expertise. If your customers buy web site design from you, you should seek to educate them in that arena. For instance, you might include an article about how they can get listed on Google Local for free.

The goal is to provide a newsletter that your ideal customer base will want to read, on a regular basis. You may not be able to write one that every single customer will look forward to, but you can do one that your most active and loyal customers will appreciate.

Stay Regular

For a newsletter to work, it has to be sent out on a regular basis. Just like with marketing in general, you need to stay in front of your prospects. The best scenario is to send a newsletter out once a week.

You can come up with enough interesting content to do a weekly newsletter. You just need to commit to it. Also, your customers will not be annoyed with a weekly newsletter, as long as you are providing good content.

If you are communicating on a regular basis via your newsletter, you are building a real relationship with your prospects. People who read your newsletter will be informed, be insiders, and will help spread the word and be more inclined to buy when you need them to.

If you just send a newsletter irregularly, with a press release or special offer, people will not be in the habit of reading it or trusting it. It will largely be a waste of time.

Always Get Permission and Maintain Trust

If you want your newsletter to be successful, you absolutely must make it permission based. Sure, it is fine to email your customer base from time to time without getting permission. But that is really no different than sending postcards. With a newsletter, you want people to buy in to the concept of it.

Send out regular invitations to join the newsletter to your customer base, but don’t just start sending them the newsletter until they sign up for it. There are lots of reasons for this. You don’t want to be seen as a spammer, for one. But also, you really want to qualify your readership. Those that take the time to sign up for the newsletter are far likelier to read it and to engage in a deeper conversation with your company.

Once you get permission, you need to maintain the trust. Never sell your newsletter list. Its okay to make offers from other companies, ie. affiliates, but only if you know and trust the product. Trust is the key to doing business. The newsletter is a goldmine for creating and building trust, because it allows you to stay in regular conversation with your prospects and customers. So honor that trust. Give value, and don’t be selfish with your newsletter.

If you follow these three rules, you will be on your way to developing a great newsletter. Now, you just need to work on creating the right content.

Have a Small Business Question? Ask me and I will answer it here – email me with your question now.

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Bradford Shimp is the publisher of All Biz Answers. He is also the co-creator of Idea Anglers, a place to see your ideas come to life through collaboration. Follow on Twitter @bradfordshimp. Let Bradford help you with your business – visit BroadRiverCreative.com