If you are a B2B business, selling to other companies, the chances are your sales people hear this response from their prospects all too often.
You have exactly the product or service the prospect needs, you are competitively priced, but they just don’t want to make that buying decision now so they don’t want to meet and discuss the details, let alone sign a purchase order.
The reality is that most customers buy when it suits them, not the seller, and very often there is little we can do to change that.
So how do we respond to their request?
We could make a diary note to do exactly as they ask and call them in 6 months. However in my experience it’s unlikely to be the right time. In 6 months a lot can happen in a business, and the likelihood is that either the decision has been postponed a bit longer or worse, they made the decision earlier than planned and we missed out!
We could make a sales call before the 6 months is up, but risk looking like a pest or desperate.
What we really need is a way to ‘stay on their radar’ that doesn’t make them feel like we are stalking them, or trying to sell to them, but gently builds our credibility in their eyes, makes us sound like a company that can help them and increase the chance of them contacting us when they are ready to have a buying conversation.
This is a classic scenario for an automated marketing programme – ticking away in the background, using pre-prepared content, possibly tailored to the prospect and monitoring their response to identify the right time for a sales call.
Marketing Automation isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ solution, but with careful design and good content, it can be a highly cost-effective tool in some sales and marketing situations.
If you would like to discuss the potential for Marketing Automation in your business, please let me know.
Chris.