Oct 28 2009
So you think you can sell?
Before you begin to sell, you will need to decide who you’re going to sell to. This means finding your Target Market. If you know who you’re selling to, you immediately have the advantage of being focused on a specific market and knowing who and what you need to research.
In your search for a Target Market, try to identify those that have a major problem and who are willing to spend money in order to fix it. Straight away, this gives you the advantage of knowing that your customer has the funds to pay for the excellent product or service that you can offer. It’s no use walking in with guns blazing, shooting off fantastic selling techniques when your client hasn’t got the resources to make the purchase.
Investigate, research, explore.
You need to select a market that you can identify with. This will be the place where you spend your days fulfilling your dreams – you need to be comfortable and able to enjoy yourself, and able to identify with your customers. This will benefit you as much as it will benefit them.
For example, it would be fruitless to try and market a Rap CD at an old-age home. For starters, your audience will never identify with your appearance (most likely resembling your most favored Rap artist). And secondly, a group of octogenarians is less likely to scramble over one another in order to purchase a CD that doesn’t qualify as “music” to them and certainly doesn’t have any lyrics that they can actually understand.
Focus. This seems basic, but in the frenzied rush to accumulate sales, this detail may be overlooked.
By finding your Target Market before you get ready to sell, you can save yourself a lot of time and money that would otherwise be wasted on inappropriate targets.
Another important factor in selecting the correct market segment for your product is finding out if you have a competitive advantage over your rivals who are in the same selling industry as you.
As part of your research, there are other factors that you may want to take into account before selecting your Target Market. Firstly, you might want to identify geographic factors. You’re not going to be terribly successful if you try to sell air-conditioning units to folks in Alaska. Secondly, take into account the demographics of your clients. You’re not going to want to sell hair-loss prevention products to young women, or shampoo to bald men. Age, gender, race, income-earning potential – these are all things to take into account when selecting the right target for your product.
And, thirdly, some companies see themselves as being high-tech or innovative, or it may be important to them to maintain a reputation of social responsibility. These are psycho-graphic characteristics that you can use as a marketing tactic. This is all good information.
Finally, investigate the behavioral characteristics of a potential market. Understand what their buying habits and buying patterns are. For example, Fortune 500 companies don’t take purchasing decisions lightly and they certainly don’t rush into them. If you understand your target market and if you can identify with them and what they stand for, you’ve taken the first tentative steps to success. You’ve found a select group of customers that may actually want to buy your product.
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So you think you can sell? is a series of sales seminars and workshops dedicated to three groups of salespeople that exist in the world today. The first group is a group of novice sales reps that are entering the field of sales. Second is a group of experienced sales professionals. Finally, the third group is a group of non-sales people who need help selling their newly created product or ideas themselves.
Please keep visiting this blog in the month of November when we will share more info about this unique sales training program: So you think you can sell?
