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The reason your prospects love all the free, helpful content you create is because they end up using it against you. Buyers are self-educating themselves via Google searches and the digital content you and your competitors share. This creates an empowered and educated buyer, or so they believe. Because they’ve done their homework, buyers think they know what they need to know in order to hold a balanced discussion with a salesperson – a discussion where the buyer can’t be “sold” but can instead, make an informed buying decision. But the self-educated buyer has a huge blind spot.
Put simply – the self-educated buyer doesn’t know what they don’t know. Because they are not immersed in the product or service they are buying, they do not always know every question to ask or every scenario to consider. This creates a unique opportunity for you and your sales team to leverage this information gap to create doubt in the mind of the self-educated buyer. And doubt is your friend.
This is where Aikido Selling, a simple three step sales process designed to leverage the buyer’s blind spot to rebalance the selling process in your favor.
Once a prospect has been identified, use their preferred medium (social media, email, phone, video conferencing or face-to-face) to understand what they know. If you can, try to determine how or where they obtained their knowledge.
Often buyers’ research uncovers mistaken or outdated. It’s important that you know this and take corrective action to correctly reframe their research data before you begin sharing new information.
Once you’ve established what the buyer does and does not know and corrected misinformation, identify the missing information they need to truly make an educated buying decision. Determine which questions they didn’t ask. Determine if any relevant product features are still unknowns to the buyer. Is there an important competitor “red flag” they missed? Take the time to discuss those items where you can drive the conversation with new information – information the prospect doesn’t currently possess but will require to truly be informed.
Whatever you do, don’t be so desperate to show the buyer that you are the true bastion of knowledge that you attack the blind spot in a manner that appears argumentative. This is the antithesis of Aikido Selling because it aligns you and the buyer as opposing forces instead of complimentary forces moving toward a common goal – a purchase.
Instead, approach this step as a caring professor seeking to enlighten the student. Don’t sell. Teach. The goal of the Aikido sale is to let the buyer sell themselves by simply helping them complete their research in a manner that favors your product or service. They want to sell themselves. That’s why they self-educated in the first place. Understand that psychological underpinning and then leverage it to close the deal and win the sale.
Hopefully this article has set you on the right track. But if you’d like to learn more about marketing and selling to self-educated buyers, feel free to go grab a copy of my new book, The Invisible Sale, where I dive much deeper into the topic and discuss actionable strategies to help your company adapt to today’s content marketing driven sales lead and close process.
Tom is 20+ year veteran of the sales & marketing industry with a penchant for stiff drinks, good debates and digital gadgets. Tom teaches companies how to Painlessly Prospect for new customers. He is the founder of Converse Digital, author of The Invisible Sale and a contributing writer for Advertising Age. Connect with him on Google+, follow him on Twitter or connect withhim on LinkedIn.
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