Understanding Your Prospects Readiness To Buy
Ask any highly successful sales or marketing professional and
they'll tell you that the more you understand the mindset of
your prospective client, the more effective you'll be in
crafting sales and marketing messages that resonate positively.
One key component of your client's mindset is their readiness to
buy.
While we may not have a great amount of control over this, it's
important that we understand the client's buying mindset. It can
take four different forms.
The first is what's called the Building Mindset. The client
views their current situation as one in which there is
opportunity for growth. When a client is in a building mindset
they are ready to buy goods or services that can help them
achieve the results they want. Prospects in this mindset tend to
be most interested in hearing about specific features and
benefits and are less concerned (although not oblivious) to how
your product compares to the competition. The focus is on how
specifically your services can help them achieve their
particular goal.
The more you can focus on the specifics the more effective your
proposal will be to a buyer in this buying mode.
Conversely, there are times when your client is in Pain. Again,
the client is in the mode of needing to buy goods and services,
but they will buy from the person who can eliminate the pain the
quickest. Speedy removal of the pain is the primary objective of
the client. Given a choice between building and pain, you can
rest assured that alleviating pain will always take precedent
over building.
Not being aware of whether your prospect is in a building or
pain mindset is often a common problem. Although you may assume
that the client is in one mindset you need to be prepared to
quickly shift gears if it becomes apparent that your initial
assumption is incorrect.
The advantages of having clients in either a pain or building
mindset is that you know they're going to be open to buying
services that will help them grow their businesses or alleviate
the pain. The most challenging buying mode is what we call Happy
State. That's when the needs of the customer are pretty well
served by the products or services he's currently using. When
the client is in this happy state there are a couple of things
we can try to reinvigorate the need to buy.
The first is to let them know about trouble or pain that may be
headed their way. In order to be credible, the more you can
discuss specific examples of the problems others are facing in
their industry, the more attention you're going to get.
Naturally, in order for this strategy to be effective you've got
to be completely up to speed on what's going on in their
industry. You've got to be reading what your customers are
reading, attending the professional association meetings, and
learning about the issues that that are of most importance to
them.
While giving your clients insights about the future is one
strategy to move them off the happy mindset, an alternative
strategy is to readjust their thinking about their business
performance. This is particularly effective when you know that
your client's competitors are achieving greater levels of
success than your client is.
"Yes Ms. Client what you're achieving is good, however I must
tell you that Your Chief Competitor just reported earnings that
are 15% greater. We've done some investigating about how they
achieved those results and I think we could help you do the same
or better."
Either of these strategies gives you a fighting chance of
getting your client out of the happy state and into a position
where they are interested in learning more about your products
or services. Think about it from your own company's perspective.
Even if you were satisfied and content, if I was to come to you
with information about why your competitors were more
successful, wouldn't you want to know how they're getting those
results?
When a client is in the happy mindset it's generally easier to
sell growth than it is pain avoidance. Unfortunately, we are
usually short sighted and hope that bad events won't hit us
directly. It's far more fun and sexy to grow a business than it
is to focus on problems. It's one of those terrible ironies that
it's very difficult to sell pain unless the person is actually
experiencing it. However, if you have an appreciation for both
mindsets you can quickly switch gears and position your
presentation in a way that is most likely to be received
favorably.
The fourth mindset is Fantasy Land, and unfortunately there
isn't too much you can do when your client is in this mindset,
except wait. In the fantasy land mode the client thinks they are
doing wonderfully, when in fact their results are terrible.
Reality just hasn't hit them yet. They're living in a dream
world. Although there is nothing you can do short-term to change
their mind, the good news is that sooner or later reality will
hit and then the prospect will most likely fall into the pain
mode.
>From a strategic standpoint you want to know the buying mode of
your clients since this will give you clues for your speeches,
articles and other follow-up activities.
For example, one of the challenges people face when they prepare
a presentation or begin to write an article is that they don't
know what to speak or write about. A helpful idea is to focus on
the business issues your clients are facing and the kinds of
results they're looking for.
In other words, discuss the buying mode that they're in.
If you follow this strategy it is likely that your article or
speech will have a broad industry appeal, since if something
pains one company, there's a high probability that others are
also impacted.
This is yet another advantage of making sure you understand the
buying mindset of your prospective clients.