Not Selling Enough?

The last article "What Are You Selling" I described blogs that sell may not be actually selling enough. So let's look at two types of blog selling techniques. The first type is the one which seem to annoy some readers. The blog with post after post about products, offers (specials and discounts), competitive advantages, differentiation in features and just about everything you expect a parrot salesman to spew at a trade show floor. The second type is building a sales "process" (sometimes also called a "funnel") with the blog articles. First it gives a little story how someone used the product, then why you need it, then how there is a new sales offer with a deep discount, and onward it goes. Every step of the way it offers another opportunity to buy the product. There are many other sales techniques, but these are the most basic and most popular.

Besides the obvious selling effort, what I see is how the work is just not enough. There is a place for a blog just about products and sales discounts. HP has a Twitter stream offering PC replacement parts. This is useful if you are an IT manager with 500 HP computers. You always need batteries, disk drives, LCD displays... you get the point. When HP or Dell wants to "unload" 10,000 batteries, why not put this offer with a discount on a blog that always "sells" PC parts. Once you do this on a regular basis, the IT purchasing managers can look once a week and buy at a discount. For products which are less generic, you need to put in more details. At two software companies, I suggested the managers to give more details, examples and actual demonstration of features. With sophisticated software, you need to show all kind of features and benefits. The book SPIN Selling describes a technique used by high complexity software sales people. They sell into large corporate customers and face a unique set of conditions. This technique can be used to sell anything which is complex and has competitive products. The techniques described is similar to the "funnel" techniques used in blogs.

What I hear from marketers and sales people is simply "do more". Sales people have a saying: "take the 11th NO". By that they mean, don't walk away from a potential customer until he tells you NO eleven times. Sounds crazy to outsiders. But it's not. People say no for many reasons. If you are reading a blog, you can decide to click away for many different reasons. Some are trivial: you don't have the time, you don't need it now, the feature is not that interesting to you... yet some are crucial: the product does not fit as well as the competitor's product, the industry is set on the other product, the people in your organization don't know how to use your product (or they don't like it!) So a blog with many different features, benefits and offers can work in the situation of a complex product with strong competition. A simple product can do better with a funnel stream of articles. You can even run both techniques and see which one returns more sales. Either way, you need to put in the time, effort and resources. Don't do a half baked job and then expect stellar results. If your product is a complex software package, with lots of features, don't expect to show ten of them and influence hundreds of people to push the "buy" button or call you right away. Life is not that simple, my friend (who sang that?)