Social Fusion: Chapter 2 – Consumer Perspective

You must begin with the consumer in mind. How do you take the focus off of your company? Your Brand? What makes you money? This can be difficult for many companies. You need to start assessing what consumers are saying about your industry and gain the consensus from your target market. Most companies are not big enough to hire an outside marketing firm to do polling and research. The average cost for one project could be $20,000.00 to a research firm.

Where does this leave the small business or a larger company looking to reduce their marketing & research budget? It leaves you with an answer we found in doing our own sales. You have the opportunity to use 3 strategies to understand the mind of your consumer: Songbirds, National Research & Success Stories.

Songbirds: A songbird is a past client that “sings” your praises. They had a great experience with your sales team and are interested in seeing your company succeed. A typical songbird will have referred you other friends and coworkers because they believe in your service, company and product.

You will need to gather 5-7 Songbirds and ask them to commit to meeting 3 or 4 times a year. Your songbirds know what is important to the consumer as they were and are a consumer. They are outside of your profession so they have great outside perspective. They are your informal survey, your opportunity to poll them for your marketing campaigns, branding and your current engagement with consumers.

National Research: Many businesses fall under a larger professional group or national organization. It is crucial to “know your numbers.” By reviewing the research conducted by your national organization you gain an understanding of the trends. It is true that all companies are different and function at different levels but by seeing national trends you gain a national perspective. Many of the reports will show you where the consumers are coming from, their buying choices and buying intervals. This can be used as a basic road map for next year.

Compare your sales and consumers with the national research. Do you see the same trends? Are your consumers different? Is there a new segment of consumers you can now go after for sales?

Success Stories: The need to reinvent the wheel. When I was young in the sales arena I had the need to impress others. I wanted to show that I could create all my own systems. I could develop the best scripts. I could make the most sales doing it my way. Why? What a waste of time!!

Thankfully I finally learned it is much more simple to win in sales. The simplicity is to find the “winners” in your industry. Who is a success story? What do they do that works? What makes them different than their competition?

Now not all of your local success stories will be willing to share because you are their competition. Your best resource will be success stories in other parts of the Country that have a similar buying cycle, similar demographics and a similar niche consumer.

Find 3 top companies, 3 success stories this week. Make it your goal to get in contact with the owners and set up a phone conference call. You may not have direct access to the company owner or president so start with whoever you can talk with and begin asking questions.

Many of the successful companies will have been called/asked by others before. Some may give you the opportunity to “shadow” them for a day or come to their office and watch their sales machine in action. I have seen these companies do it for free and others that charge 5,000.00 or more a day. If your current resources do not allow for that type of expense find the 4^th success story. One principle I have learned over the years is that many of the successful people at the top love to share and give to others. No one was a complete success on their own. We as people always enjoy the ability to help others. Put yourself and your company in the position to be helped by these successful companies.

*** Stay tuned for more details on the E-BOOK entitled “Social Fusion: The Modern Day Approach to Selling”by James Nellis