Gone are the days of receiving a call, a price is agreed and a sale made. Yet so many salespeople are still living as if this is the case. To stand out, to be remarkable, we have to get comfortable in what Google’s terming the ‘messy middle’. They define it as “a space of abundant information and unlimited choice that shoppers have learned to manage using a range of cognitive shortcuts.”
We have to understand that we are the ones that have to make the effort. Now, more than ever, our customers have a great deal of information at their fingertips. There are many sources they can refer to before committing to a purchase decision. They can check our credibility, our authenticity and whether we really are the brand they want to choose, the one that will best serve their needs. Not ours.
To be successful in this paradigm, we need to be prepared to spend time curating our brand story and then communicating it in a way that is relevant to the medium. It is clear that we need to establish a number of touchpoints in order to stand the best chance of creating awareness for what we have to offer.
We need to journey alongside the prospect as they explore and evaluate the product category and various brands prior to choosing the one they will look to buy from.
And they don’t just want to hear our perspective. They can corroborate whether or not we do what we say. Whether we offer the service we promise to. Whether the product really is great value for money.
Google remarked in their latest research paper Decoding Decisions “It’s about how consumers deal with scale… If behaviour has evolved, as we believe it has, then it is crucial that marketers understand how consumer decision-making has changed so that they can continue to uncover new growth opportunities and defend existing brand share.”
Next week we will unpack how to identify the “Messy Middle”
To download the full report from Google go here
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