Once upon a time a great ad in the Sunday newspaper and a superior location on Main Street was the secret to a successful business. Welcome to the future! Now, successful sales growth requires connecting with your audience, identifying key words that strike a chord with targeted prospects, and over-delivering on service promises. Nevertheless, above all these attributes, effective selling relies on communicating and connecting with cultivated buyers. Simply, a great story accomplishes this achievement! Storytelling enables prospects and customers to join vendors on the ride toward business growth and mutual satisfaction.

Sell To Your Audience
Just like a great story has heroes, villains, and conflicts, business interactions feature various parties interacting to resolve particular problems. As business becomes more complex and fluid, customers and competitors become more difficult to distinguish. Simply, telling the good guys from the bad guys gets harder. Consequently, messaging consistency becomes more essential. Knowing the audience’s expectations does, too.

For example, customers no longer typically visit a lot to shop for a car. They investigate online before narrowing their selection. They verify with trusted resources. Furthermore, prospects really no longer want a car. They want a conspicuous, stylish representation of their station in life; or cost-effective, reliable transportation. Consequently, success dictates selling the lifestyle, not the performance metrics. Sales results directly relate to intimately knowing the characteristics and motivations of specifically defined targets. Growth happens when vendors identify, then sell, to their audience and no one else.

Service Beyond the Sale
Furthermore, selling now reflects multiple series of events. Consequently, marketing and selling must coordinate in unprecedented ways. Considering that customers arrive with more information than previously possible, customer expectations have dramatically increased. Service beyond the sale is more than profit-enhancing warranties and insurance options. Effective selling now features promoting new customers into the community of customers.

Literally, purchasers are buying into the tribe! Newsletters, social media groups, video testimonials, surveys, updates are part of the selling, service and satisfaction experience. Asking for referrals is now mandatory and expected. So, is including customers in conversations about new developments. Customers are now part of the vendor’s ongoing story. Customers’ ability to contribute to effective storytelling perpetuates branding success. Superior results demand perpetuating positive interactions, sharing industry innovations, in addition to communicating customer success in market focused conversations.

Takeaways
Effective marketing means leveraging every opportunity and attribute to continue sales growth. Approach sales efforts with that mindset. Repeat customers remain more cost-effective than prospecting for new ones. Referrals are more cost effective, too. Actively cultivate both. Be present in the customers’ culture. Understand and use the marketplace’s evolving language and behaviors. Claiming a product is 99.4% pure is no longer effective marketing. Depending on the product, selling the product’s purity almost connotes illegal activity. However, contributing content and events to the target market’s community expands marketing efforts that results in new prospects eagerly turning into loyal customers. This marketing approach only works when the community believes the narrative. Be truthful. Emphasize storytelling power to promote business into new audiences, and subsequently new markets.

By Glenn W Hunter
Managing Director of Hunter And Beyond, LLC