Recently, solutions selling expert Stu Schmidt took a deep dive into concerns-based selling in a six-part series for The Marketing Scope, covering why people buy, what you can learn from a lost deal and everything in between. There’s so much valuable information in these six pieces that it helps to focus on one at a time. Part three, for example, focuses on anticipating buyer concerns, a valuable step in both sales and marketing. Let’s look at that today.
There are four steps to anticipating buyer concerns:
- Identify the personas involved. This step is critical. Why? Personas shape campaigns, provide insight into how to engage your audience, and help you determine how to best use your content to move leads through the funnel.
- Find out what’s important to each persona. It’s one thing to have a list of personas, but it’s another entirely to use it. Understanding what matters to each persona from both a business and personal perspective can make your sales and marketing initiatives that much more effective, turning pitches into conversations that convert.
- Identify your value. Next, clearly identify how the value of your product or service can satisfy those persona-specific concerns. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people rely on standard feature and benefit schpeals instead of focusing on finding clear solutions to persona concerns.
- Turn it into a growth strategy. For forward motion, look back at the three prior steps and learn from and improve upon them, building a strategy for growth.
Even if you do everything right in the process of anticipating buyer concerns, you can still fail. That’s right—you can do everything right and still lose. Maybe those concerns or challenges you were aiming to solve weren’t high up on your prospect’s priority list. To avoid wasting your time and theirs, you must identify those priorities as early as possible.
Want more tips? For the full breakdown, read Stu’s article here. Only have a few minutes? Watch Eric Vidal briefly dissect Stu’s commentary in this edition of Marketing Mash:
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Eric Vidal
CEO at The Marketing Scope Eric Vidal, an industry expert with over 25 years of marketing and technology experience is passionate about providing insight and education on the latest martech trends and techniques. Eric speaks and writes for various publications like The Marketing Scope and Future Of Work to name a couple. Eric has been a marketing leader for companies of all sizes. He has extensive experience working to achieve measurable business results for organizations like IBM, Cisco, WebEx, Canon USA, West Corp., Dynamic Signal, SAP and more. Connect with Eric on LinkedIn.