Sales and marketing strategies, or rather the ones you choose, are probably subject to change. They are a bit of science and need to be tested on an ongoing basis to see which ones work and which don’t. The strategies you choose whether offline or online should adhere to the basic principal of – people buy people IMHO.
Regrettably the hard sell approach seems to be hanging in there but it’s a short-sighted approach and not one that’s going to bring loyal, repeat customers to your business.
Bad sales and marketing strategies
Just ask yourself how you feel when you answer the phone only to hear background call centre noise for a few seconds before a sales person picks up and immediately starts to sell you PPI – for the fourth time that day. Not one of the best great sales and marketing strategies you might think yet it never seems to stop.
Approaches like this rely on the law of averages. They are a numbers game played by thick skinned, hard sales merchants. Obviously they must still work or they would have stopped by now. That example is of a sales approach based on a known product shelf life. There is only so much money in the PPI pot after all.
Online Strategies
Some online sales strategies are very similar. With the element of actual human contact removed, online hard sell relies more on copy: emails and now texts. My particular pet hate among online sales and marketing strategies are the wildly long-winded auto responder ones favoured by many American Internet marketers.
Pausing for breath
They must realise that the first thing people do when presented with an email from an unknown source is to scroll down and see how long the email is. If it’s 10 pages long I personally delete it as I’m sure do most people – but not everyone. Similarly there are some video based marketing strategies that follow the same style. I’ve seen some that have almost made me lose the will to live. How do these people manage to talk for so long without pausing for breath?
Press the sexy button that makes it stop!
I suppose the theory is that people will eventually be badgered into submission and press the sexy button that makes it stop! – It’s only $19.95 for god’s sake and I can cancel it if I don’t like it – just stop talking at me!
With all sales and marketing strategies the point is to get your message across in a way that engages and interests the audience. That’s very different from bombarding people with the same message over and over.
I am taking the piss a bit about the long texts and videos – they clearly work and the internet world is a very big place so they will find buyers but I’m really referring to the ones that take so long to get to the point. I can’t listen to someone for half an hour or more if I don’t get what they are selling. Maybe that’s just me though – I’m Scottish and us Scots like things short and simple.
Get it to them
The strategies I like are the ones that appeal to me for whatever reason and the whole point of marketing and advertising are to find out what I like, need or want and sell it to me. I recently watched a presentation by an extremely successful online guru where he told us what his mentor advised him on sales and marketing strategies: FOWTW – find out what they want. FOWTGI – find out where to get it. GITT – get it to them – Succinct and to the point. Just the way I like it.
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