Create Awareness
Getting your ideal customers to learn that you exist. People can only do business with businesses they know about.
The Selling Mindset
The most important part of being in sales, is the attitude that you bring about the work you are doing. If you don’t believe in what you are doing, neither will your customers.
Why This Model?: You need to have the right mindset to have the confidence to do a big awareness push.
Sales Are Not An Afterthought
Sales are important. If there are no sales, then a company is not making money in its own right. From the very beginning of any company, sales should be paramount.
Why This Model?: This needs to be done early on and in quantity, as it takes so many touchpoints for a customer to move from awareness to a closed sale.
Time Management
Time management is extremely important for sales people as they have to prioritize their sales prospects, their existing customers, administration, and often the many other things on their plates.
Why This Model?: Stay organized to get more awareness.
Company Brand
What is your business all about? Understanding your business’ brand is important as you need to verify that this is aligned with who you are.
Why This Model?: Branding is part of what you want to communicate in your awareness campaign.
Test Your Offering
Before you invest too much of your money into a business idea, how can you find out if a consumer will actually buy? Testing your offering is a low risk way to see if your product/service is market ready.
Why This Model?: You want to make sure that your offering resonates prior to doing a lot of awareness.
Features Vs. Benefits
The best sales people speak about benefits rather than features to their customers. Features bore customers, benefits enthrall. Learn how to do this.
Why This Model?: You want the right messaging to be part of your awareness campaign.
Unique Selling Proposition
Looking at your brand and your customers, what can you truly offer them that is different from the competition? Knowing exactly what is unique about your offering makes it easier to sell.
Why This Model?: You want the right messaging to be part of your awareness campaign.
30-Second Pitch
A 30-second pitch is the way to talk about your company by making it relevant to your audience. Thinking about who you are talking to is one of the key pieces of a 30-second pitch.
Why This Model?: You want the right messaging to be part of your awareness campaign.
The Buying Group
In a complicated sale, there is often more than just one person involved. This group of individuals is called “the buying group”. Knowing who they key players are and what matters to each of them, will help you customize your sales approach.
Why This Model?: Know that there are multiple people that need to be aware of your business within the buying group.
The Sales’ Funnel
The purpose of the sales funnel is to drive sales through it. By understanding your sales funnel and analyzing it, you are able to refine your sales strategy.
Why This Model?: Know how the awareness part of the funnel will impact the rest of your sales.
Generate Awareness
Customers will not do business with you unless they know that you exist. Learn the different approaches to generating awareness and find out if you are doing enough in this area.
Why This Model?: Learn the basics about awareness and the best practices.
Inside Sales
The best sales people think about what their customers are thinking first. The best cold callers do the same. By starting with your customer on the phone, you are able to say the right things that will generate interest.
Why This Model?: Inside sales is the most cost effective way to generate awareness with business customers.
Drip Marketing
Email marketing can be extremely effective in reach out to new customers and following up with existing customers. But it is only effective if customers ready it. Find out how to create a email that customers want to open.
Why This Model?: Collecting emails during the awareness stage of the sales funnel is a good idea.
Integrated Marketing Strategy
An integrated marketing strategy is when you use multiple marketing tools, and delivery the same message to the same audience, to help reinforce the message.
Why This Model?: All of your marketing together is able to generate even more awareness than one tool independently.
Social Media’s Impact
There are thousands of social media tools available online, and this number is growing as the popularity grows and niche markets are explored. Do you know which ones you should be using?
Why This Model?: Social media is one tool for more awareness.
Tradeshows
Tradeshows are a great form of learning and lead generation. But they can be expensive, time consuming, and a lot of things can go wrong. How do you mitigate the downside?
Why This Model?: Tradeshows is one tool to generate awareness.
First Impressions
How do you make sure that people like you within those first few seconds in person or on the phone? What are the proven secrets?
Why This Model?: During the awareness process you are creating many first impressions.
Networking
Networking is one of the best (and easiest) ways to generate sales leads. The challenge is that it can end up taking a long time. What are the best practices to getting the right leads?
Why This Model?: Networking events is where a lot of people are going intentionally to be more aware of small businesses.
Sales Cycle Length
The more quickly you can close a prospect, the more time you have to invest in other customers. And the longer a prospect stays in the funnel, the less likely that they will buy. Learn how to keep them moving.
Why This Model?: Getting customers from awareness to interest helps with reducing the sales cycle.
Whales Vs. Minnows
Every sales person wants to track down a whale of a customer as it is assumed that this is where all of the money is made. However, there are different reasons and different ways to sell to big companies versus small businesses.
Why This Model?: Getting awareness with whales is more difficult as there are more gatekeepers.
Former Customers
Former customers already know about your company. Following up with your past customers is a good opportunity for them to consider using you again. Plus, do you know why your customers left you?
Why This Model?: Former customers expand your reach for more awareness.
Referrals
Friends, relatives and current customers refer business to you, not to help you, but to help the prospective customer! It’s important to realize this?your goal is not to ask for referrals, but to explain why a referral would help a prospective customer.
Why This Model?: Referrals expand your reach for more awareness.
Channel Partners
Why sell when you can get other people to do it for you? “Channel partnering” is the process of setting up other people or businesses to sell on your behalf, enabling you to focus on your core competency.
Why This Model?: Channel partners expand your reach for more awareness.
