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Attention Distributors! Focus on what matters to each buyer and a goal or a struggle with which they’re dealing. You’ll immediately stand out from the crowd.
Today, it’s ALL About the Buyer
Since the beginning of time, companies have focused their sales and marketing messaging on themselves — How good we are at what we do, How wonderful our products and services are, Why you should choose us, etc.
Today, messages like that fall on deaf ears. Information bombards us at lightning speed, and we can only absorb so much. Buyers have trained themselves to quickly sort through this bombardment of messaging by quickly recognizing (or not) “what’s in it for them.”
Focus on What Matters to Each Individual Buyer
Next time you have a shot at a buyer’s attention, let them know right off the bat that you’ve got something valuable for them — something that addresses a goal they’re after or a struggle with which they’re dealing.
Doing so successfully begins with knowing your buyers and sharing what resonates with them. Easy for most salespeople to do. Not so easy for your digital sales and marketing collateral.
For example, if you’re a lighting distributor, you sell to large institutions like hospitals and universities, and you sell to small and mid-sized contractors. When your salesperson meets with a buyer from a hospital or university, he’ll have a much different conversation than he would have with a small or mid-sized contractor — even if he were selling them the same product.
When your salesperson is not in front of a buyer, your digital sales and marketing collateral must communicate how he would, having just the conversations that relate to each buyer. Your institutional buyer should see/read/hear only the information tailored to institutional buyers, your contractors should just hear from you about what’s important to them, and the same for every other segment you sell to as well.
Buyers Have Come to Expect This
Your ability to do this successfully is a critical ingredient to a successful digital sales transformation. It can be quite an undertaking because distributors have never had to do this before. Personalized, tailored messaging fell solely (and successfully) to the sales team.
To communicate with your buyers effectively, your marketing team must understand the buyer as well as your salespeople do.
Here are some steps you can take to do this successfully:
1. Divide your audience into segments that share common goals and pain points
2. For each segment, identify the struggles or goals your company can help with
3. Identify the challenges or obstacles each audience segment has in overcoming their struggles or attaining the goals
4. Identify how your company can help them overcome the challenges or obstacles
5. Create digital messaging around the information you’ve identified and share with your audience segments
Why This is Important
When your buyers see you addressing their specific struggles or goals, and you’ve also spoken to their challenges or obstacles, they’ll see you understand their needs. They’ll recognize that you’re in the business of helping them with their business. You’ll build their trust.
Creating Buyer Personas
The five steps above make up the initial steps to create your buyer personas — segmenting and understanding your audience.
Buyer personas help eliminate the blurred lines between various customer categories — those fuzzy areas that lead to overgeneralizations in your sales and marketing materials. They clearly delineate each audience segment and what matters to them.
Your salespeople already know the subtleties that matter between customer categories. Your online sales messages can do that, too, through the information you generate by completing your buyer personas.
As a result, you’ll have all you need to ensure your communications immediately pass the “what’s in it for me” test. It’s a significant and necessary step toward communicating the best information to each audience segment.
How to Get Started
Have you begun the audience segmentation process? It starts with completing The Best Buyer Persona Worksheet for Distributors, which you can read about in this article.
In the meantime, if you’d like additional information or need to ask a question, please get in touch with me at Susan@SusanMerlo.com. I’m here to help in any way I can.