Greg's Right FIT #377

Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . sometime next week. 

In this issue: 

- Thoughts on Selling
- Being Human
- Random Stuff

Thoughts on Selling

• Matching your selling process to your buyer's decision process requires asking customers and prospects to describe their buying decision process. However, when you ask, don't act surprised if they have a hard time describing it to you.
• The nature of buying certain products is that organizations may only do it once in a great while. On the other hand, sellers sell those same products over and over. In a perfect world, the sellers would act as a best practice consultant for buyers. Human nature makes that a challenge.
• Savvy sellers can use their knowledge of various buying processes to help buyers make better buying decisions. This requires them to elevate the right decision above selling their products. Quota and distrust of sellers makes this hard to do.
• Next week, remind your people of Zig Ziglar's old adage, "People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care." Ask how you can better demonstrate "care."

Being Human - Reading the tea leaves

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”–Martin Rees

A challenge in research is watching people without their knowledge. As soon as people know your measuring something, even if they don't know exactly what it is, their behavior changes. It's the Hawthorne effect. When you get a chance to study un-altered behaviors, it's a bonus. 

For years, I've been teaching/helping with lead generation for businesses. Their sales cycles vary, from individual buyers of low price goods to committees making high dollar purchases, but the process is the same. A problem is identified, solutions are explored, solutions are narrowed, purchasing happens, and implementation begins. The first part of the process, problem identification, is where I spend a lot of time looking for information.

My favorite place to look is Google Search Ads. It's one of many places buyers go to ask questions, but the only one I know of that comes with a unique feature: we see the actual search terms buyers are using early in their decision process without their knowing it. 

Sellers get excited when they hear this, imagining a single source they can use for hidden insights revealing the secrets of their buyer's decision process. Unfortunately, it's not like that. It's more akin to reading tea leaves than an oracle of prediction.

I like it because when I learn about a client's sales cycle and compare it to how their customers describe their buying cycle, things jump out. We run ads on those terms and it never fails that new words and phrases show up. Especially early in a decision process. This search information combined with everything else I learn, drives improvements in lead generation. 

If you ask your marketing team about search engine advertising, and they say something like, "it doesn't work for us," have them pull a search term report. It's under Keywords -> Search Keywords -> Search Terms. Sort by Impressions and Clicks/Interactions and break the list of terms into likely early and late phrases. It's a good exercise to stimulate conversation. 

(if there's no information or you're not running search ads, that's another thing altogether.)

Good stuff. 

Random Stuff

“I'm your number one fan. There's nothing to worry about. You're going to be just fine. I will take good care of you." – Annie Wilkes

Thank you for the good thoughts about the Mighty Creighton Bluejays men's basketball team last weekend. It worked. In case you aren't up on NCAA March Madness™ news, they won both of their games and advanced to the Sweet 16™ this weekend. On Friday night they'll defeat Princeton University to advance to the Elite 8™. I hope. 

It may be hard to see in the above photo, but my sister and brother-in-law went to last weekend's game, as evidenced by their pics on the scoreboard. My son was there too, along with dozens of old classmates. One of whom dug up this old picture:

We all lived on the same floor in our dorm, and we played in-state-rival, the University of Nebraska that night. As a group we spent the entire game yelling at their coach, Danny Nee. We were floor level, very close to their bench. I can't remember exactly what was said, but I remember the big guy in the fedora, Lou the Samoan, bellowing, "Heeyy Daannyy!" most of the game. At one point Coach turned to face us and flipped us off. Something that endeared Coach Nee to me ever since. 

Well, flipping us off and the story my friend tells about talking to Coach Nee at a summer AAU game where his son was playing. He asked Danny to say some words of encouragement to his boy, who was a good high school player wanting to play in college. Coach watched his son for a while and after the game said, "keep up the good work . . . and get taller." 

Go Jays!