It stands to reason that, more than at any other time, in an economic downturn it’s vital that your communications are effective and capable of leveraging salespeople’s time and enabling prospective customers to move through the sales process as quickly as possible.
By anticipating and getting to them the information that they need to move to the next level.
Effective communication programmes can generate demand for products, create a sense of urgency, attract prospective buyers and keep you prominently on the radar screen all of which without sales intervention.
Yet too many organisations under-estimate the complexity of prospective customers buying process and fail to design communications that properly influence behaviour.
Getting to the heart of what your customers need and delivering the information they require to move to the next level in a way that affects behaviour begs four simple questions:
- Specifically who is the buyer that needs the information?
- What information do they need to know?
- What is the best way to reach them?
- How do you get them to pay attention to your communications?
There is only one way to find out. Ask them! Get prospective customers to walk you through the process they use when making similar purchases. The information that you uncover will help you determine your message and which media to use.
Use the purchase-process map to identify everyone involved in the sale. Ask: who orders the product? Who manages the inventory? Who will use the product? Who influences the decision to buy? Who controls the budget? Who will dispose of the product? To reduce risk at a time of recession, strategic decisions about your communications need to be taken based on facts, not assumptions.
Compliment your purchase-process research with in-depth interviews and you’ll uncover a layer of insight that gets to the motivations of your prospects. Understanding these will help you create communications that engage and connect with your audience on an emotional level and help identify creatives that will have the greatest impact.
Testing various presentation formats and calls to action with a platform that facilitates creative experimentation whilst retaining the capacity to determine which ideas resonate with your audience is essential. The big wins almost always come from simple A/B testing to try bold new ideas, rather than complicated multivariate testing (MVT) which squeezes incremental returns. Organisations that take the time to fully understand their prospective customers buying process will succeed in identifying the message that generates the optimum response and will ensure its delivery to the right audience, at the right time. Their rewards will include improving the return on their investment, speeding up the sales process and improvement of sales productivity.
