Selling by Letting The Customer Do the Buying
I love this graphic - it’s a simple graphic that shows how you can become effective at selling by letting today’s customer do the discovering and buying.
As shown, rather than put a lot of energy behind cold calling leads and selling your way to the promised land, today’s customer doesn’t want to be “sold”.
graphic from For Entrepreneurs on Cold Calling 2.0
Instead, they want to go at their own pace to discover their way to a solution, first by doing their own research, then by dipping their toes in the water with some sort of trial offer, and finally, diving in only when they are certain they have arrived at a solution from a supplier that they can trust and commit to.
There’s a lot to setting up your sales & marketing approach to make sure you drop the right amount of bread crumbs at each stage of customer discovery, and you can read a great piece in For Entrepreneurs by David Skok on Cold Calling 2.0 to learn more about how to do this. But the short answer is that you have to put together a well-oiled machine in your sales & marketing organizations to make sure each stage of this process is set up to be as efficient as possible.
