Think Like a Sales and Marketing Guru

Imagine you and your sales team possessing such powerful written and verbal communication skills that referral sources and patients cannot resist doing business with you instead of your competition. With the sales and marketing strategies I am going to teach you today, you will begin to write letters, ads, emails, social media and Web copy few can resist. Your salespeople and marketing materials will outshine the competition and grab the attention of your target audience.

With this new ability, you will be able to generate more referrals/ new business and command higher commissions and compensation for your work. This strategy will give you the edge you need to create successful sales and marketing campaigns that get immediate results. When you follow this strategy, you will find that you can think and communicate like a sales guru. With practice, you will amaze yourself with your new ability to create compelling sales conversations and marketing copy in a whole new way. By the time you have finished reading this article, you will be able to understand your referral sources and patients and persuade them to act using only your words. My primary focus today is to teach you how to do the following:

• Easily capture your target customer’s attention
   
• Engineer messages that excite your audience and gets them to take action
   
• Attract more visitors to your website
   
• Convert more sales
   

These are the same strategies I use with Mike Sperduti Companies and all the clients we help worldwide with products and services that make life easier and better for all. You can achieve the same results by following three simple and natural steps in the sales and marketing engineering process.

1. Stand in your customer’s shoes.
    
2. Engineer a compelling message that gets his or her attention and engages the customer.
    
3. Design a call to action.
    

Important—Before you start any sales and marketing program, you must have clear goals. What are the specific reasons you are executing this campaign? What are the specific financial and performance goals for the campaign?

Step 1

Stand in your customer’s shoes.

The best sales and marketing gurus know one thing: It is not about you—it is about the customer. Most companies and people make the mistake of writing about themselves, their stories, their offerings and how great their companies are. Focus your message on your specific customer—not on you. If you ever look at an old high school picture or any group photo, whose face do you look for first? Obviously yours! That is because you are interested in yourself first. Everyone’s primary focus is him or herself. Great sales and marketing messages start by talking about your target customer. If any of your sales and marketing materials start with you or your company or your great background story, then you need to stop immediately! Change your focus to a problem your customer currently needs solved or some other topic that is specific to their business. By following this simple principal in human psychology, your message will have the power to break through all the other noise of your competition. Grab their attention simply because your message is engineered to appeal directly to your customer’s wants or needs.

Step 2

Engineer a compelling message.

The next step is to clearly list all of the current issues and problems your target customer is experiencing and specifically detail how your product or service helps them solve this problem and makes life easier and better than the other solutions that they are currently using from your competitor. Make a list of features and benefits of the product or service you are offering. This exercise will lay the foundation for what you will include in your sales/marketing message. You want to answer the following.

1. Why does the customer care about this conversation with you or this marketing presentation?
    
2. How does your product/service impact the customer’s life and solve their problem?
    
3. How much better will the customer’s life be after owning this product/service?
    
4. What specifically makes this a better solution than their current solution and others like it on the market?
    

Next we need to create a story that relates to your customer. People love stories that are conversational, and will focus more on a story about how your product will help them live a better and more productive life than on a straight-laced sales pitch. You will use the answers to the above questions to craft and engineer your story. Always think from the customer’s point of view to come up with a well-constructed story and a message that is engineered to be interesting and compelling.

Once you have you have crafted a precise and well-engineered message, look to add powerful visuals to your message. They say a picture is worth a 1000 words and the right picture can increase your message’s effectiveness by 1000 percent—the right picture can make your entire sale!

Step 3

Design a call to action.

Remember the most basic rule in sales: people buy from people and companies they like and trust—it is only natural. Once you feel you have a message that is genuine and have developed a sense of intimacy and likeability with your customer, your message will break through the noise of all the other salespeople and stand out among the 10,000 other advertisements. Now you are ready to design a call to action. You have your customer’s attention; you need to decide what you want them to do.

Here are some typical calls to actions:

• It makes sense to me we start today. What do you think?
   
• Would you like to start with one case or two?
   
• May I add that seat cushion for you today?
   
• Call the number listed
   
• Sign up for our mailing list
   
• Click “Buy Now”
   
• Print out a coupon and take to store today

There must be a clear call to action on every sales call and marketing piece. Whether you are on a sales call, writing for a website, a direct mail piece or UpCare campaign, it is crucial you take the time to clearly communicate what you want the customer to do now that they have this information. Every sales call and marketing message must have a call to action. The Mike Sperduti rule is, “Everything we do in sales and marketing is to get the customer to take the action we want them to take that will make their life easier and better.”

You have just been introduced to what I believe is the most powerful process to engineer sales and marketing messages that sell millions of dollars in the health care industry. Start engineering messages that create meaningful and memorable conversations with your customers. You will be amazed at how these simple rules will transform your sales and marketing initiatives.

Now make a cup of coffee, tea or hot chocolate. Sit down and start writing, using each step in this article. You will be amazed at what you are going to achieve. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah and Happy Holidays from your friend Mike Sperduti!

This article is the final in a seven-part series. Each segment focused on retail and marketing techniques to promote profitability. Read all the articles in this series here.