In an insightful post by John K Thompson on the Chief Marketer blog called To Avoid Overload, Engage Your Audience, John begins by pointing out the all-too-many outlets of information available to us.
Too many twisty knots of overloaded information confusion, and not the filters to hand me what I need when I need it. Too many sites, widgets, snippets, tidbits, documents and files, and not nearly enough brain power to do it all by myself…Not enough options for finding what I need, and too much to find. Not enough guidance on how to actually move efficiently through the gold mines of data, and too many gold mines.
Couple this with a comment a sales guy for a manufacturing firm made to our me the other day.
Then He Gave Up
He said he got exasperated with salespeople who didn't stay with him after a good initial interaction, going on to say “We had a good meeting and then, as always, I get slammed. The salesperson left a voicemail or two, maybe an email and then he gave up.”
Granted, the process is a two-way street but the comment was certainly revealing.
So we have too much information to process and even when we’re interested in a service, it’s exceedingly difficult to act on it as quickly as we’d like; quite an uphill battle for the sales person trying to break through to their prospects.
So what’s the solution?
It’s the mantra we base our business on: consistency and adding something of value with each reach-out.
John writes the following in his post:
. . . remember that it's imperative to personalize our communications with customers and prospects, and to keep them permission based. Anything else becomes merely technology-enabled spam. And your customer will treat it, and your relationship, as such. Which is to say, disposable.
Personalization is, in our world, a natural extension of our value-add philosophy, and if you’re a firm exclusively handling your own new business program, it should be yours as well.
You should read the entire post; it centers on social media specifically and is good advice, not only in a general sense regarding your prospecting, but also as companies continue to include social media in their efforts.
John ends with the following apt words:
. . . we must remember the purpose of all of this. And that's to engage our customers in an ongoing dialogue, demonstrating that we truly value them as individuals, and aren't just using all this neat technology to make it merely seem that way.
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