Episode 1
with Simone Douglas
In this episode, Simone talks about the importance of telling the story behind the business to connect with your audience as opposed to outright selling. People do business with other people, and the stories behind those people are what help humanise a brand.
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Chris Irving 0:11
Welcome to the confident networker podcast with your host Simone Douglas. In each insightful episode, Simone does a deep dive into the strategies, tactics and tools that will help you be a confident networker.
Simone Douglas 0:32
With today’s consumer atmosphere of brand loyalty, it really demands an authentic and unique presence to stand out in a saturated market. Yet companies and businesses continue to shout about their products from the rooftops, at least the digital ones and set themselves up for failure with false promises, delivered in the form of an out of touch and gimmicky marketing strategy that invariably leaves a sour taste somewhere along the customer journey.
Creating coherent and responsive messaging that articulates a brand’s value is significantly easier when the message is honest, authentic and connects who you are as a business to the values and the needs of your customers. The most critical aspect of a marketing strategy is to create messaging that supports the identity of the business or organization and positions it honestly within its marketplace. This is the main difference between storytelling and story selling. There are infinite narrative strategies that can be thought up to build up or sell a brand business or a person that said a simple approach of being genuine, is not only the easiest to portray, but the most scalable, adaptable and stable. In order for this genuine approach to work, a business must deliver on the expectations that it sets. With its customers. It’s easy to get distracted by all the noise in the business world at large. But jump day is your chance to settle in and work on your business in ways that allow you to make the most of your opportunities today, tomorrow and forever. Today’s show is the very beginning of reviewing and reframing your approach to your customers experience through your sales and marketing. So settle in because all the best stories are told with the audience’s full attention and today is no exception. If you put the learnings into place, you will have started your preparations to belt 2021 Out of the stratosphere. After all, we didn’t wake up this morning and decide to own an average really successful business now, did we? The purpose of today’s show, is to give you an understanding of narrative marketing from a humanistic perspective. Storytelling is a form of interactive expression that engages an audience’s imagination. More simply, it’s the writing and telling of stories. When it comes to content marketing storytelling doesn’t change much. The end goal is to engage your audience’s interest, imagination and most importantly, their feelings. Storytellers thoughtfully consider who their audience is and what stories they’re interested in. For businesses becoming established and seeing conversations through storytelling can be a slow but meaningful climb when most businesses don’t have the patience or make the time for stories offer honesty, humility, transparency, vulnerability and integrity. Something that adds the product of our marketing efforts just can’t do. So when it comes to our customer. The most successful businesses have a carefully crafted balance of storytelling and story selling that engages both the heart and the mind, and then ultimately the wallet of their ideal customers. So let’s have a look at what the key issues are from a business owner perspective. First up, what are the pain points for our customers or what problems are our customers trying to solve? It’s important to understand that a pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing. customer pain points are as diverse and varied as your prospective customers themselves. However, not all prospects will be aware of the pain point they’re experiencing, which can make marketing to these individuals difficult as you effectively have to help your prospects realize that they have a problem and convince them that your product or service will help solve. Although you can think of pain points as simple problems that often grouped into several broader categories. The four main types of pain points I like to look out for any business customers are financial pain points, so your prospects are spending too much money on their current provider solution or products and want to reduce their spend productivity pain points, your prospects are wasting too much time using their current provider solution or products and they want to use their time more efficiently.
Process pain points. Your Prospects want to improve internal processes such as assigning leads to sales reps or nurturing lower priority leads or support pain points, your prospects aren’t receiving the support that they need at critical stages of the customer journey or the sales process. Viewing customer pain points in these categories.
allows you to start thinking about how to position your company or product as a solution to your potential customers problems and what is needed to keep them happy. pain points are problems plain and simple. So, what is the discovery journey and path to purchase? Or in other words, where do our customers investigate solutions to their problems? And what are they looking for? Identifying the past a purchase is our way to anticipate the various steps the customer takes leading up to the purchase so that we can interact with them meaningfully along the way and influence their decision in our business favor. If you understand how your customers get to buy your product, you’ll be able to understand how their journey along the path to purchase happens until they’ve been converted into an actual paying customer. Some business owners litter their customers journey with a random dump of messaging touchpoints intended to lead potential customers down a one size fits all path, ultimately resulting in confusion, sometimes irritation and often redirection to a competitor’s off ramp. As a potential customer embarks along the path to purchase you need to educate them so that they progress through each phase. Your Path to Purchase consists of six phases awareness, consideration, preference, action, retention, and finally advocacy. So how do our customers use the information we give them? And what are our competitors putting out there to make our customers make that purchase decision? If you want to get people to buy stuff, you need to understand how your potential customers make their purchasing decisions. People research products they compare competitors some 87% of buying decisions begin with research conducted online. Usually Amazon or Google product quality and seller reputation matter of course, but what about when a product matches the customer’s needs and they trust the seller what influences a purchase decision once those fundamentals are in place? Remember, reviews matter. So for deciding on products and companies people gather buying recommendations from mixed sources even though social media and the internet rule, customers make purchase decisions using a combination of old media, new media and conversations with friends and family. Simplicity always wins for decision making. cognitive fluency is the human tendency to prefer things that are not only familiar, but also easy to understand. Psychologists have determined for example, that shares in companies with easy to pronounce names significantly outperform those with hard to pronounce names. Coincidence? I don’t think so. cognitive fluency also explains why you continue to buy from brands and service providers you’ve used before, or why you often order the same thing from the menu. It’s just easy. You tried it, it worked and you don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching alternatives. You don’t want to risk a bad purchase. As a marketer. This means it’s critically important to get a customer to decide on that first purchase. What are we selling? And what are the benefits of our product or service. Think about your last few marketing campaigns look over some of the emails you’ve sent to prospective customers or the social media updates you made promoting your brand new product or service. Read over some of the blogs you’ve published. How much of this promotional content focused on what your product does. When it comes to marketing, there are two primary approaches you can take. The first focuses on what your product or service does, including all the shiny bells and whistles, the other focuses on how your product or service will improve users lives. Focusing on the benefits of your products or services, which can be significantly more effective. It doesn’t matter where you are in your business right now is definitely the time to be taking a solid look at exactly where you are and making some realistically decisions about where you want to go in 2021. All whilst keeping your finger on the pulse this quarter. Like it or not every business stands for something if you get it right, it’s a good thing. And when you get it wrong, it costs you both opportunities and sales as customers fall out of the nest along the way through misalignment of messaging to customer expectations. If this is your first time listening, welcome to the world of seriously social sales and marketing were relationships. We knew this out. And if you’re a returning listener, thanks for being part of my seriously social Global Business family. We’re now going to take a short two minute break. And when we return, we’re going to get into the detail on what we really need to be looking at in order to successfully understand and deliver on our customer expectation.
So now we’re moving on to what it is that you need to know. So what is it that we need to do here? Exactly? Do we understand the difference between storytelling and story selling? When it comes to our marketing and sales collateral? Have we got the mix right? Have we aligned roles with in our business organization to meet our objectives? In other words, do the right people in the world
organization have ownership over the right tasks in order for us to succeed? Or are we all flying by the seat of our pants? Have we made it easy to collaborate by aligning technology, terminology and processes with outcomes? Is it documented and streamlined? And does everyone know how to use everything and what they’re expected to do? You need to have KPIs every step of the way. There’s no point getting to the end of the month, or the quarter and not knowing where you’re at before you arrive there. So what are you tracking how and why, then, of course, you have to make adjustments and when necessary, tweak your entire approach. This is the beginnings of a cohesive and integrated sales and marketing framework. Like it or not, every business stands for something. And so getting it right is a good thing, getting it wrong costly opportunities and sales. So let’s take a look at how we understand the customer expectations. Businesses that get to know their customers and study their perception of the company gain valuable insight into how they can create better products, services and user experiences. By definition, customer expectations are any set of behaviors or actions that individuals anticipate when interacting with the business. Historically, customers have expected basics like quality service and fair pricing. But modern customers have much higher expectations, such as proactive service, personalized interactions, and connected experiences across channels. So to better understand how customer expectations are changing. Salesforce research surveyed over 6700 customers and business buyers globally. And you know what they found out 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. So customers expect connected journeys you need to break down your business silos, we don’t like to get bounced from place to place. 70% of customers said that connected processes such as seamless handoffs or contextualized engagement based on earlier interactions are very important to winning their business. So you can pretty much bet that if your customer journey isn’t mapped, and you don’t know who is picking up which touch points, this is where that’s going to fall down. So how are you handing over your accounts? Who are you briefing? And how are you making sure that the customer feels like they’re important the entire way through? Customers expect personalization, so you need to customize everything. So 59% of customers surveyed said that tailored engagement based on past interactions was very important in winning their business. So how are you tailoring your marketing, messaging and your sales experiences?
The modern day customer expects innovation Okay, so customers expect companies to provide new products and services more frequently than ever before, it takes more for a company to impress customers with new products and services. And we expect great experiences but mostly reality falls short in this era of exponentially disruptive technological change, often referred to as the fourth industrial revolution, sorry, revolution, products and services that are cutting edge one day or outdated the next. As such, the experience of business offers is increasingly its differentiator, but the scope of customer experience is changing to to win hearts, minds and wallets. Businesses must not only deliver amazing marketing sales, e commerce and service interactions, but also prove that they have the customer’s best interests in mind. Customers expect a lot from companies but don’t have faith in them to deliver. About half of customers say that most companies fall short of their expectations for great experiences. The reality is that today’s customers expect businesses to understand and care about them as individuals and treat them accordingly.
It’s no longer a numbers game, it’s very much a relationship game. There’s a considerable opportunity for businesses that are able to interact on an individual basis with customers from personalizing marketing journeys to providing informed and unique customer care to better understanding a customer’s unique needs. 72% of consumers and 89% of business buyers say they expect companies to understand the unique needs and expectations while 66% of consumers say they’re likely to switch brands or businesses if they feel treated like a number and not an individual. So for those able to deliver this more human touch, the rewards are considerable. Delivering personalized experiences drives customer loyalty. So we need to study our customer segments and our customer journeys. Our customers are more in control of their purchasing decisions than ever before. With the advancement of digital technology customers easily reach offerings, compare multiple businesses and seek out the best prices smart businesses have employed big data and analytics to react to their customers. And he said
Take their next moves and study the journey that led them to their offerings. Cx consulting firm Walker declared that customer experience will overtake price and product quality as the key brand differentiator in 2020.
The customer journey map is a tool to visualize the experience of interacting with your brand. from the customer’s point of view. This map is critical because it forces you to look at how your customers actually experience your brand versus how you think they do. By better understanding your customers you can deliver on their expectations. According to Blake Morgan, a customer experience futurist, you must invest in becoming an experienced lead business which means optimizing every customer touchpoint. By understanding the customer journey business to business companies can stay a step ahead of the customer to lead them on the path for a great experience and a quality product or service. So by understanding the customer experience, both as it is and the ideal state, you can create, adjust and enhance touch points to ensure the most effective and efficient buying and service process. As a result your customers will be better able to achieve their goals from their pre purchase through to their post purchase experience with your company. So think of a typical purchase journey across the three phases early, middle and late. This approach forces you to understand the experience from the time the buyer is figuring out whether the issue needs to be solved, and is then considering different ways to solve it. Your goal is to uncover struggles that customers would have with any supplier, not just your company. Just remember the customer journey should extend to include the experience with your company post purchase. Whether your pre or post purchase driven sort of purpose driven or profit driven your company has to be focused on how prospects and customers interact with the brand across five major touchpoints your website, your outbound marketing, your sales team, your customer support team and your major brand presences on owned channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Start with the end in mind whose journey mapping and want to capture the entire journey while highlighting the essential moments and then make the map actionable. Empower people across the organization to influence the journey. journey mapping is a creative process that allows you to understand and then redesign the customer experience. The output is not just a pretty picture once maps developed is meant to be a catalyst for change within your organization. Then you want to analyze how the perception of your business has changed over time. And many businesses have a reasonable if imperfect sense of how customers perceive them, it is possible to pursue a simple low cost alternative to a fully fledged brand research study by studying new social media and online product reviews and that will give you clues and tips that you can action in order to be more successful. We also need to survey our lost customers and competitors customers. Customers who have abandoned the company have demonstrated a need for the service and a familiarity with the company and provide us with a way to better meet their needs by studying their previous purchase history. To take advantage of this information successful business owners survey lost customers asking how they use the product before canceling and why they canceled. They also like to observe how they respond to when back offers customers not company’s own brand perception brand perception is what customers believe a product or service represents not what the company owning the brand says it does. brand perception comes from customer use experience functionality, reputation and word of mouth recommendations on social media channels as well as face to face. A brand is more than just the sum of its products. It has its own carefully crafted personality. And we mentally process sensory images for our business to create our own perception. You take advantage of that by using visual, auditory, olfactory, taste and emotional cues.
So it’s important to look at all of those things as well as your social media monitoring. Make sure you’re benchmarking yourself against your competitors and understanding why customers choose competitor brands and how competitors differentiate themselves in the market. You can use this knowledge to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors weaknesses and improve your own business performance. You can also assess any threats posed by both new entrants to your market and current competitors. This knowledge will help you be realistic about how successful you can be because all of us face competition. We also want to keep an eye out for potential market disruptors. So disruptive innovations originate in low end or new market footholds and are made possible because they get started in those two types of markets that are low cost to entry. We’re now going to take a short two minute
break. When we return, we’ll cover off on what you need to do to action the key elements contained within these topics, and why they matter in your quest for an epic 2021.
So what do we need to do today? Well, to start off with, we want to review your messaging. Have you connected at the head and at the heart? Are you selling the benefits or just the product? By studying consumers unconscious physical reactions Harvard Professor Gerald zolman found that what they really think or feel, often contradicts what they say, Why aren’t consumers truthful about their purchasing thoughts and feelings? Well, a big reason is that they’re driven by unconscious urges the biggest of which is emotion. Emotion is what really drives the purchasing behaviors and also the decision making in general. studies completed by neuroscientists have found that people whose brains are damaged in that in the area that generates emotions are incapable of making decisions. This idea is of great importance because it helps us realize that human beings are not as logical as we might imagine, and understanding this has significant implications for marketing, sales and branding. For example, by only marketing the attributes of your product, you will likely generate lackluster results, and the poor results you receive are due to the fact that you are completely missing the subconscious human element in the decision making process. Humans are driven by feelings. So if you want the consumer to remember your product or brand, they must be engaged and impassioned by the interaction with your business. Good marketers utilize this concept all the time and examples of emotion based campaigns are everywhere. Think for a moment, what is actually being sold in most marketing campaigns. luxury goods target our feelings of self worth, acceptance and status in the world. communication devices excite us by offering a connection to friends, family and a broader network of people. Athletic brands inspire us by offering adventure and glory through the active competition and many other products such as perfume, cologne and lingerie, target emotions related to love relationships and sexual desires. As marketers, we should still focus on the features of a product, but we must also sell the lifestyle and the feeling. The key is to highlight the emotional response a consumer will achieve by using your product or service. To achieve the highest emotional response you should target your consumer through many different senses. For example, think about the colors and shapes on your logo homepage or product packaging. How do they make the consumers feel? Consider the words and messaging carefully? Are they emotive and engaging? What is the experience of your retail location, these face to face interaction should give customers a certain feeling about your business? So consider all of those things and then we move on to mapping the customer journey. Where are your customers at? What do you know about them? And are you building relationships or just yelling at them about how good you are? By mapping your customers journeys? You can refocus your company with an inbound perspective rather than just trying to discover your customers through outbound marketing. You can have your customers discover you with the help of inbound marketing. outbound marketing involves tactics that are poorly targeted at generalized or uninterested audiences that seek to interrupt customers from their daily lives. So by mapping out the customer journey, you can understand what is interesting and helpful to your customers about your company and website. And what is turning them away. You can accordingly create the kind of content that will attract them to your business and keep them there. A customer journey map is like a roadmap to the customers experience. It shows you moments where people will experience delight as well as situations where they might be faced with friction. Knowing this ahead of time allows you to plan your customer service strategy accordingly and intervene at idle times that maximize your brand’s value to the buyer. proactive customer service also makes your brand appear more reliable to your customer base. So it’s important to consider all of these things. Before you can dive into creating your map you need to ask yourself, why are you making one in the first place? What goals are you directing this map towards? Who is it specifically about and what experience is it based on? Based on this you might want to create a buyer persona This is a fictitious customer with all of their demographics and psychographics who represents your average customer. Having a clear persona is helpful in reminding you to direct every aspect of your customer journey map towards them. Next, you should conduct some research. Some great ways to get valuable customer feedback is through questionnaires and user testing. The important thing is to only reach out to actual customers or prospects.
Do you want the feedback of people who are actually interested in purchasing your products and services, and who have interacted with your business before or plan to do? So? Some examples of good questions to ask, how did you hear about our company? What first attracted you to our website? What are the goals you want to achieve with our business? In other words, what problems are you trying to solve? How long have you or do you typically spend on our website? Have you made a purchase with us? If so, what was the deciding factor? Have you ever interacted with our website with the intent of making a purchase? But decided not to? If so, what led you to this decision? On a scale of one to 10? How easy is it for you to navigate our website? And did you ever require customer support? If so, how helpful was it on a scale of one to 10. Once you’ve learned about the different customer personas that interact with your business, you will need to narrow your focus to one or two of them. Remember, a customer journey map tracks the experience of one customer type who’s taking a very specific path with your company. If you group too many personas into the one journey map, your map won’t accurately reflect your customers experiences. If you’re creating your first map, it’s best to pick your most common customer persona and consider the route they would typically take when engaging with your business for the very first time. Based on your research, you should list out all the touch points your customers and prospects are currently using as well as the ones you believe they should be using if there is no overlap. This is an important step in creating a customer journey map because it gives you insight into what actions your customers are performing. If they’re using fewer touch points than expected, does this mean they’re quickly getting turned away and leaving your site early? If they’re using more than expected does this mean your website is complicated, and it requires them several steps to get to an end goal. Whatever the case may be, understanding the touch points is a tool that can help you understand the ease and objectives of customer journeys. This doesn’t just mean your website, you need to look at all the ways in which your customer might come across you online. So that might include social channels, paid ads, email marketing, third party review sites or mentions. So running a quick Google search of your brand and finding where you come up is going to be really important, then you can whittle your list down to those touch points that are most common.
Bearing in mind that there are four types of customer journey maps that each have their own benefits, there’s current state. And so these are customer journey maps that are most widely used.
They visualize the actions, thoughts and emotions your customers are currently experiencing while interacting with your company. And these are best used for continuous improvement of Day in the Life. These are customer journey maps that visualize the actions, thoughts and emotions your customers currently experiencing all activities in which they partake on a daily basis. Whether or not that includes your business, this is a wider lens into the lives of your customers. Then we have future state, which is visualizing what you believe will be the actions, thoughts and emotions of your customers in future interactions with your business based on their current experience. And most importantly, we have a service blueprint type of customer journey. So these begin with simplified versions of one of the above maps, and then they layer on the factors responsible for delivering that experience, you’re going to need all of those over time, then you want to have a look at whether or not your collateral is measuring up. So if you’re an outsider looking in how would you really interpret what you’re being presented with from your business, get an outside point of view, and be prepared to let go of what you thought you knew and embrace what you learn. Your customer journey map is going to touch on nearly every part of your business and it’ll highlight all of the resources that go into creating the customer experience. So it’s important to take inventory of the resources you have and the ones that you’ll need to improve to make the customers journey a pleasurable one as opposed to a friction orientated one. So maybe your map will highlight some flaws in your customer service offer or you notice that your team doesn’t have the tools they need to properly follow up with customers after service interaction. Using your map you can advise management to invest in customer service tools that will help you to manage customer demand. And this will make it much easier to convince gatekeepers and decision makers to invest in your proposals. Just because you’ve designed your map doesn’t mean your work is done. This is the most important part of the process analyzing the results. How many people are clicking through to your website, but then closing out before they make a purchase? How can you better support customers? These are some of the questions you should be able to answer with your finished map. So making sure then that you collect some data, call some of your ideal clients and ask them who they use what makes them a great choice. Your data analysis should give you a sense of what you want your website to be and do. No matter how big or small the changes are they’ll be effective as they directly
correlate to what customers listed as their pain points, rather than blindly making changes in the hopes that it will improve the customer service experience. We’re now going to take a short two minute break. And then when we return, we’ll bring it all together and look at why any of the things that we’ve covered so far matter, and what the direct impact can beat your bottom line.
Okay, so we have covered as usual and epic amount of content and need to tie it all together. So let’s take a look at your key actions for this week. Remember the questions we need to be able to answer. So number one, what are the pain points for our customers? Or what problems are they trying to solve? So here you need to map out all of your buyer or customer personas, get a clear understanding of what the benefits as opposed to the features of each product or service offering are, and how that matches to your buyer personas expectations. You also need to ask yourself the question, if you’re selling this as a benefit, or the painkiller to their pain point, is it going to do what you said it would? Or is it just so much hype? So it can be a critical aspect here to make sure that you have listed in one row all of the features of your product or service? And then the benefits to specific persona types and personality types so that you understand again, what is it that you’re really selling? Because that will inform your sales and marketing messaging, but also the way that your customers approach sorry, your customer service team approach their engagements with your customer?
Then we moved on to what is the discovery journey and path to purchase? Or in other words, where do they investigate solutions to their problems? And what are they looking for? We’ve covered off on customer journeys in detail today. So you’ll need to get building the ones that you need based on the key buyer personas that you construct. Remembering that there are four types of customer journey maps that each have their benefits, depending on the specific purpose you have for the map, you can choose the one that’s most beneficial. Current State Day in the Life future state or service blueprint, I recommend that you work your way through all of these. But then you need to map out all your internal flags against those touch points, who is responsible for what? How much of that is human? And how much of it is automated? And in those automated engagements, how are you humanizing them as much as he can. So like anything in business, we always need to evaluate whether something is efficient, or effective. Often we make the mistake of defaulting to efficient AI automating processes. But it turns out that it’s not effective, because as we heard earlier in the our customers expect a personalized experience, they want to be treated like a human being and not like a number. So what we need to do is demonstrate to them, that our values and the way that we conduct business are a good match to their values and their ethics. And this becomes part of that storytelling element. That should inform a lot of your content across all of your different social channels. We need to then move on to how do our customers use the information we give them and what are our competitors putting out there in the market to help them make purchase decisions. Market research involves collecting and analyzing information about your market, including your customers and competitors. There are a number of different types of market research. So desk research, using existing information from the internet and industry associations. In other words, Google is going to be your friend here, then you want to move on to some field research. So gathering the information yourself you think surveys and questionnaires and other research tools. So you want to use the customer satisfaction surveys as well as Net Promoter Score questionnaires. And you may well have your own customized questions that you do through a phone, interview or otherwise. And what’s important here is that you’re getting the information from the horse’s mouth so to speak, and you have clarity around the information that you’ve received. Your other option, of course, is you can outsource it to a commercial agency. So hiring an external organization that will carry out the research for you. The danger here, I suppose is that potentially if they don’t have a clear understanding of your industry or your market segments, they may not capture the information that you’re looking for. researching your competitors is easier than it may seem. For example, you can simply collect any flyers price lists and produce for customers read that online material, or even buy their products and services to compare them with your own. analyze what they do better than you. Are their prices lower. Now their products have a higher quality is their customer service highly regarded? Is their marketing material more engaging, have they more effectively engaged the heart before they’ve gone talking to the mind? Ask yourself these questions
To see what you can improve. being critical of your own business and taking some inspiration from your competitors can help you be more competitive but can also help you better connect to your customers. And then we need to really get clear about what are we selling? So what are the benefits of our product or service? What impact must it have, if it’s in the business to business space is it competitive advantage, or in business to consumer is that lifestyle orientated? every product or services sell needs a feature versus benefits analysis done on it. Both features and benefits are equally important for effective advertising copy. But at the end of the day, it will be the benefits that give you the best advantages of converting customers.
So the difference between benefits versus features the feature of a fast internet connection provides the benefit of being able to find you your way when your last fast internet connection is a feature but the ability to quickly find your way when you lost is a benefit. If I use the Duke of Brunswick as an example, the feature of a gluten free kitchen it means that you’re not going to be up all night throwing up the benefit is understanding that you’re safe and your health is not going to be impacted by going out to eat. So features a define a surface statements about your product such as what it can do. Its dimensions and specs, and so on benefits, by definition show the end result of what a product can actually accomplish for the person reading or taking in your marketing messaging. Are we using storytelling throughout our channels. When you show the benefits of your product, think of it like telling a story, you want to engage the audience and leave them feeling an emotional connection. Therefore, you should describe a scenario in which a feature was beneficial to a person that the target audience can relate to. And like all good stories, your story should have a villain. That is to say a problem that your brand was able to solve for someone. This makes your brand or your business the hero of the story which makes the emotional connection between your brand and your audience that much stronger. Storytelling could be used to demonstrate the benefits that a chiropractor provides. For example, a chiropractor could tell the story of a client whose back pain was preventing him from working, and how treatment allowed him to support his family again. The target audience in this case would be the people with back pain who could empathize with the fear of not being able to perform work during their own affliction. By showing that the chiropractor was able to solve this dilemma it establishes a connection with the target audience who now see the chiropractor as an answer to their own problems. It takes time and patience to learn how to focus on selling the benefit versus the features of your products. Take the time to perform some writing exercises this week so you can improve your skills and give your advertising as many advantages as possible. So try making a list of your products features and practice writing the benefits for each do this again for different audiences. Even audiences you may not have considered before, you might just find a new way of looking at your product that helps you better connect with your customers. Then we need to move on to how our customers use the product or service we are providing is it user friendly. So user interfaces have become a commonplace element of physical and virtual products and experiences. Good experience designed seamlessly fulfills user needs and lets them accomplish business with ease. The usability of a product can be determined by its features allowing the user to do what they want to do with it. The environment in which they are performing these tasks determine its level of usability. There are three main outcomes of a user interface. One the user should become familiar with and competent in using the product upon first contact to the objectives of a user should be achieved easily and three, the interface ought to be easy to recall on subsequent visits. So how do you measure up go away and test against the basics lastly, a quick word on sales and marketing alignment sales and marketing alignment is vital for both organizational success and boosting morale. In order to sync up sales and marketing teams should shedule regular meetings to keep track of shared goals and communicate freely about workflow obstacles and wins. This ensures both teams have a voice when setting strategies and planning the content will be most impactful at each of these stages. In order to have a truly coordinated sales and marketing team, everything has to sync up including goals roles, systems and technology. So when you’re looking at all of these things, you’re mapping out these customer journeys get all of your teams involved. Powerful Account Based Marketing and marketing automation tools will enable one to one conversations with prospects instead of just talking one to many. For maximum benefits marketing has to ensure the methodology process and terminology used to support these efforts is in alignment and collaboration with the sales
More importantly the customer centric and humanistic approach to your business.
Remember, an integrated sales and marketing strategy is key to every organization’s success. That said, it all starts with the story you’re telling. If you’re keen to make the sales you have to satisfy the heart, then the head in order to access the wallet. It’s also not fixed in stone. Sure, you might have completely nailed all this when you were a startup business. But now you have grown and you rely on other people, the story needs to make sense to them and to your customers making the purchasing decisions. At stage three, we’re learning how to cement our customer and referral relationships through messaging, sales, collateral, and most importantly, people. We’re in the process of leveling up. And that means fixing our gaps, refining what’s there and playing the long game in terms of our marketing. So always a few quick wins to be had. But the reality is, it’s the long game and the hard yards that gets you to stage four, which means we have to do the work. Next week show, Is does your six word story measure up? Or are you faking it until you break it? We’ll be looking at marketing and sales and service experience. And are we delivering on the expectation so do we live our values every step of the way?
Chris Irving 41:09
Thank you for listening to the confident networker. You can find more episodes and information at bnian.com.au/podcast
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