If you want to start selling more, become a professional stalker. Not a professional talker.
Finding customers, having more conversations, generating leads, converting leads into sales, closing on pitches and proposals. We all want more of these. We want more customers to buy funnels from us.
So how do we sell more marketing funnels? One of the ways we can sell more, is through better selling.
Being better at sales.
The most common misconception about being BETTER at sales, is that you have to be brilliant at TALKING.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fundamental key to becoming better at sales, conversions, lead generation and pitches is to stalk your customers. Find out everything you can about them and learn from them.
The more you know about your customers, the better
Your customers and leads are giving away everything they want, all the problems they have and all the goals they have.
By spending time learning from them, stalking them and understanding them, you’ll gain HUGE insight into their lives and business.
The more you know about your customers, the better suited you are you helping them.
Understand everything you can about your prospects
At the highest possible level, during a discovery call or meeting, you ask questions and learn more about your customers.
Think about trying to sell a marketing funnel, or anything for that matter to a customer, if you didn’t know anything about them.
How hard would that be? How hard would it be to sell something to a customer when you didn’t know anything about them?
You wouldn’t be able to provide the right solutions. You wouldn’t be able to price properly. You couldn’t help them and you would struggle to understand what’s going to get them to buy.
If you run a discovery meeting, asking the right questions, that gives you a pretty good insight into what they’re telling you that they want. They’ll tell you what problems they have and what they’re facing. But it’s not the whole picture.
We need to go deeper and look at what they’re not telling us.
In this post here, I talk about the killer questions that you can use to close more sales.
You can also watch the video below where I go over those questions.
These questions are what you need to ask at a minimum. But they’re also questions that you can discover without asking the customer.
Take a look at their site, their catalogues and their sales content. What are their average sales points? Who are their customers? Who follows them on social media?
The more you can uncover about your potential customers, the better you can help.
Go to where they hang out and stalk them
Where are they online? LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook groups? Do they go to networking events or seminars?
Where do your customers go and what are they doing? Is there a common hobby or event that they all love?
Below, I talk about how we’ll buy customer’s products in order to understand as much as we can about their business.
Interviews, articles, stock reports on Hargreaves Lansdown, public records, annual reports, books, courses. You name it, whatever your customers sell, produce, publish or promote, you need to get involved in.
The deeper your understanding of a customer, the better.
Write up notes about who they are, what they like and what they want
What are your customers in favour of? What are they against? Is there anything that they love, or loathe or like, or hate?
CRM systems provide amazing spaces to takes notes down for customers. But you can even keep them in a notebook or worksheet like Google Docs.
The important thing is that you’re collecting data from your customers and learning from it.
Before we have ANY conversation with a potential new client or lead, I’ll do everything I can to go over the notes we have on them.
What have they bought from us in the past? What are they buying now? What’s their turnover? How many people work there? Have they published any blog posts recently?
Hell, if it’s good enough for Michael Scott, it’s good enough for you.
Find out everything you can about your customers and leads. The more you know, the better you’ll be at talking to them, finding referrals and connecting with them on a deeper level.
Get contact information and locations
The deeper you go, the more you’ll uncover.
You will be STAGGERED at the level of information you can uncover from Googling, LinkedIn-ing and Facebooking.
Email addresses, phone numbers, networking events, social profiles, blogs. The list of contact information, addresses, offices, events, profile and contact methods is endless.
There is almost nothing that your customers can hide online.
Big, large contract customers (the types we can only dream of) are discovered, engaged and sold to when you’re willing to become obsessed with finding out everything about them.
The schools they went to, who they’re associated with and more.
Get contact information and use it to reach out to your customers and leads and prospects.
Your customer’s customers
This is a key component of your research.
Your customer’s customers. Who do your clients sell to? Who is buying from your customers?
The more you can understand them and what they’re doing, the better. The more you understand about who buys and who loves your customers, the better you’ll understand what type of business they are.
You want a CRAZY powerful method to getting in the room with a large customer? Bring them a customer. Bring someone a lead or sale or some business and they’ll owe you a meeting.
Do something for them, that your competition AREN’T doing. Research their customers and bring them one.
Get involved in their business and presence
Finally, get involved with your customers. If they’re tweeting stuff out – talk to them. Share their content with their customers.
Send them useful content and CREATE useful training for them. Prove that you’re committed and researching their business. Show off that you want them as a customer and that you’ll willing to be an advocate and ambassador for their brand.
Be a part of their system and start to promote their work. Help them. Prove you can help them by helping them and use that as an excuse to have a conversation.
If my potential customers offered coaching for $100 a month, you bet your ass I’d take it. $100 to guarantee to talk to them? Discover what they are and what they sell? That’s a golden opportunity.
So are you going to talk or stalk your customers? The more you know, the better.
Get in touch with your customers using sales emails and contact them with epic content. You can even use our sales emails templates below (hell, give them away to potential clients if that’ll win you their business).
Let me know the types of customers you’re going after in the comments below. Where do you stalk your customers?
