Silent Marketing – How to Hit Your Target

 

Want to grow your sales and profit? Listen!

Silent Marketing – How to Hit Your Target

 

Can you believe that we’re already in February? 12.33% of 2011 has already gone!  So how have you spent the first 12% of 2011?  Are you on target to achieve your marketing goals?

In fact today is February 14th – Valentine’s Day.  It is the day for publicly celebrating romantic love.  But that’s another story.    I always take this opportunity to remind my clients  to focus particularly on their marketing relationships.  Accomplishing your sales and profit goals require good relationships with others – especially your prospects, customers and employees.

In February I urge my clients to re-establish their marketing relationships for another good reason; to regain momentum. As we all know, the New Year usually kicks off with new resolutions, high expectations and motivation but by early February, we tend to lose momentum.

Achieving goals is not always easy.  How many times have you set a goal and not achieved it?   Well, read on and hopefully this will help you hit the bullseye.

To achieve success with your sales and marketing goals, you need to answer the following  critical questions:

• Do you know what to do? – knowledge
• Do you know how to do it ? – skill
• Do you know why you want to do it?  – motivation

The most important question, yet the least understood, is the last one.  Why it is  important for you personally to achieve that specific goal.    Until you can answer this question, you will not be fully committed to your goal.

So, don’t forget…12.33% of the New Year has already been and gone.  Isn’t  it time to re-visit your marketing, sales and profit goals?

Are they where they should be?

 

Silent Marketing: “Empathy” – How to prosper beyond your expectations by walking in your customers’ shoes

 

Want to grow your sales and profit? Listen!

Silent Marketing: “Empathy” – How to prosper beyond your expectations by walking in your customers’ shoes

The more you and your organization can understand and empathize with your customers’ key motivators, the more likely it is that you will have sustainable success.  Do you know what motivates your customers to buy?  What is the empathy level in your business?  Do you and your organization really get your customers?  If I ask the key players in your market today, would their answer be that you just don’t get them?

Empathy is the ability to step outside of yourself and see the world as other people do. It is one of the most under-appreciated abilities in business.  Empathy helps to make good marketers into great silent marketers.  Silent marketers see new opportunities faster than their competitors.  You must put aside your own issues and put yourself in the other person’s shoes.   This ability is a key ingredient to eventual market success because it allows you to develop products or services people really want.

When you use silent marketing to understand your customers’ needs as real human beings better, and create high-profit innovations in both current and new markets, the sky is the limit for you.  When you learn to truly walk in your customers’ shoes and see the world with new eyes, you leverage empathy for growth in an unstoppable way.  Ultimately it leads to better products, better profits, and happier customers, employees and owners.

So stop worrying about your own problems and start caring about the world around you – your customers’ world.  In addition to its big economic benefits, silent marketing with its increased empathy for your customers can have a personal impact, as well.  You have a better day at work.  You and your employees will look forward to going into work every day.  Has your organization got a strong sense of empathy?  If so please let me know.

What do you think?  Share your view and comments with the world.

Silent Marketing: How to get people to love buying from you

Silent Marketing: How to get people to love buying from you

Want to grow your sales and profit? Listen!

Marketing, done right, is ridiculously simple – not necessarily easy.  In its purest and most effective form, it’s just about figuring out what people want and giving it to them when and how they want it.  Nobody does this better than silent marketers.

Is it possible for you to arrive at the right problem definition or provide the best solution without significant input from your customer?  I don’t think so.

You must satisfy and make your customers happy or very soon you would have no business.  Instead of focusing on making a profit, you must focus on creating value that matters to your customers.  What do they value?  What are their needs, wants and aspirations?  What will make them richer, happier and their lives easier?  Identify these carefully and provide the best solutions for each and they will love you.  They will open their wallets and willingly spend their hard-earned money with you.  Moreover, they will bring their friends, family members and colleagues to buy from you.

Don’t guess what you think would satisfy your customer.  Experience shows that these are usually way off the mark as they tend to be based on your wrong assumptions.  Don’t try to guess the answers, as tempting as it might be.  Keep it simple and do the simplest and most obvious thing – ask them.  Then listen attentively to everything they say and respond appropriately to your newly gained marketplace insights.

How can you get close to and know your customers intimately?  Listen to them talk about themselves – their dreams, fear, opportunities, problems, etc.  Instead of telling them how wonderful you are, listen to them.  They will, in effect, tell you how you can help them buy effortlessly from you.  Your own subsequent communication, in response, would be right on target as a result.  This is efficient and effective.  This is how you achieve excellence in marketing.  Dare to be different.  Embrace and practice silent marketing.

As I said at the beginning, marketing is about figuring out what people want and giving it to them when and how they want it.  Silent marketers do this better than anybody else.  Be a silent marketer.  What do you think?  Share your comments or questions with the world now.