The Customer's Route To Your Sales Team

At some point, every single one of your customers was totally oblivious to your existence and to the products and services your business provides.  And I hope you will agree with me that your best customers are those who not only buy a lot from you, very often, but who are also active members of your 'surrogate sales team'.  If you could get more of the 'oblivious' to become 'sales team', that would be good wouldn't it?

If only there was a clearly defined, well signposted route available to them, don't you think that many of them would get a long way down that path?  By understanding the sections this route needs to have in its construction, you can make it easy for them to do so.

The first thing is to register on the prospective customer's senses, to achieve consciousness.  You need to provide several means by which this first perception can happen, and you should be doing so in places where you know your ideal customers are likely to be.  You can't expect them to come to you at this stage.

Next, the prospect has to have a better acquaintance with you and the things you can provide.  This could be provided by the other 'consciousness' messages which they happened not to come across first.  Equally it could be the repetition of a message.  In either case, the prospect will not start to absorb your messages until they have this acquaintance with you.

Now, with prospects very aware that they know of you and are familiar with you, they are in a position to absorb what good they will get out of doing business with you and what sets you apart from your competition, your distinctiveness.  If you try to ram your messages down their throats before they have arrived at this point, your efforts will have been wasted.  And 'ramming' is unlikely to be productive at any point!

Now the prospect has an interest in possibly purchasing from you, and you need to make sure there is a simple and obvious means for them to communicate this interest back to you.  All the previous effort will be wasted if the prospect has to 'jump through hoops' in order to indicate that they'd like to know more.

The fifth step is to convert their interest into an initial sale, and for now all I will say is that this is a subject of its own, and that yet again there is not one fixed 'one size fits all' mechanism for doing this.

Having bought from you once, you will be trying to get the customers to buy from you again, to gain repeat business from them.  As before, there will not be just one single tactic that will work on every occasion.

Maybe after their first purchase, or maybe later, you would be hoping that your satisfied customers will be letting their contacts know how good you are and how pleased they were to have used you.  To achieve this you must not neglect the need to provide the means and the encouragement for them to do so.  In other words you need to recruit them into your sales team and then 'train' them.

Several things now become apparent from this route from 'oblivious' to 'sales team'.  Firstly, that it is actually a circular path, because the activities of the 'sales team' will introduce previously 'oblivious' new people at the 'consciousness' level.  Secondly, that enabling a prospect to journey through consciousness, acquaintance, distinctiveness and the cultivation of interest is Marketing; from interest to sale and to repeat business is Sales; and that through repeat business, sales team and full circle to new consciousness is Marketing once more.

Thirdly, the three 'mores' of growing a business can also be mapped onto these ideas.  The first part of Marketing is getting more customers; the early part of sales can also focus on getting them to buy more; and the later overlap of Sales and Marketing to achieve repeat business can also encourage buying more often.

Out of all these thoughts is born your Sales and Marketing strategy!

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