Sales & Knowing Your Audience

We recently watched “The Guilt Trip”, a comedy starring a struggling salesman (Seth Rogen) and his overbearing yet endearing mother (Barbra Streisand).

The title of this post is “what we can learn from Seth Rogen & Barbra Streisand”… we should also add “and how to apply this knowledge to a successful website & digital brand“. There’s a fantastic scene in the movie where Seth (an otherwise terrible salesman) has his “Ah-Ha!” moment, and gives a brilliant beyond brilliant sales pitch.

There’s actually quite a bit to take away from Seth’s sales pitch that we can distill into principles for a good website & online brand. Our favorites are below:

1) Know your audience and connect with them emotionally. 

This is vitally important. You must know your audience inside-and-out. Connecting with them emotionally will increase conversion ratios quickly. What drives your audience’s purchasing decisions? What objections do you need to address? Try to be playing 3-level chess while your audience is playing checkers… be three steps ahead.

2) Let them tell you how to sell to them!

Both in sales and web design, this is perhaps the most-important factor that drives success. Listen to your audience groups! They will tell you what’s important to them. Leverage your website to collect information from your audience groups. Analytics, conversion funnels, forms, and website paths will tell you what your clients are interested in.

3) Listen to what they’re saying and engage them. 

If they have an objection, acknowledge your perceived shortcoming and resolve the objection. Remember- perception is ALWAYS reality. If they perceive your product/service to have a flaw, YOU HAVE A FLAW (whether it actually exists or now).

Everything about your online brand should be centered around building value for your product or service offering. If you’ve built the perceived value of your product/service higher than the asking price, you’ll earn their business. Every time.

So… how do you build value for your brand? We could write books on the subject. But here are a few quick ideas:

• Design needs to be professionally done by someone with skills as an artist/designer. If you hire your cousin to design your website for $700, you’re not fooling anyone. Clients can smell when you cut corners. If you’re proud of your business, your website needs to reflect such.
• Have well-written web-copy. Web copy is a vastly different discipline than any other type of copy. Web copy is the perfect marriage of marketing/sales copy and educational copy.
• Engage & communicate with your audiences where they exist… re: social media

4) Know their level of awareness to your industry & the solutions you provide. 

Your audience groups will have varying levels of awareness about your industry, your competitors, your company, and your service offering. Knowing how aware they are is extremely important. You will hit a conversion home-run if you can communicate directly to your audience groups at their awareness levels.

5) Have a unique selling point, and confidently stand by it. 

Every business has a unique selling point. What do you do differently/better than your competition? Your USP needs to be proudly and predominantly displayed and communicated on your website. Be unique.

Now…. watch Seth’s sales pitch!