Making it easy to buy

Grant Leboff: So Bryony one of the important points that I think you make in the book is, I suppose in my language, it’s about helping people to buy. The fact that actually, if you make it to difficult for your customer, prospect, they’re not going to buy. So where do you see those things going wrong within the marketing process?

Bryony Thomas: Yeah, it’s a critical point isn’t it? It’s amazing how many companies are really quite difficult to buy from. You’d think they didn’t want to sell anything. I’d say that the first real issue here is that often this is point in the process where marketing is seen to stop. That marketing’s responsibility is to deliver you leads and then sales picks them up and does something with them. I think that disconnect is one of the key issues here. In the Watertight Marketing methodology what we talk about, this is the funnels, part of the buckets, funnels, and taps. The funnels piece, personally, I feel that a salesperson who doesn’t have a really good kit bag, that’s been supplied to them by marketing is a salesperson who’s very poorly served. It’s about thinking what the buyer needs to know, understand, try, in order to make a really informed and active choice. Providing tools and techniques that allow the customers either to take themselves through that process or a salesperson to pull out the kit bag something that the customer would enjoy and find useful at that stage.

The sort of things I would have here would be, first of all, making sure that you have a gateway product. I talk about earning the right to time, so making sure that you have created something that the value exchange is the time that they’re giving you. In return for your time of say an hour I will put on a web seminar or a seminar or a lunch and learn from which you will leave with value for your time.

Then at the end of that having something that his value for time and data and then something that is value for time and data and money. So essentially there you have a product ladder that takes someone through the value exchanges, which is time, data, and then money. That goes to quite a natural place like if you met someone and you were going to get married you know, you’d chat – time – then you might get their number, then you might move in with them. You don’t go from naught to sixty. So create a sequence of offerings that allow people to increase the value exchange.

Grant Leboff: One of the things that I think you highlight is well as the importance of endorsements, testimonials to aid that whole process. How does that play out?

Bryony Thomas: Yeah, it’s so important isn’t it, and I think increasingly so for any of us who’ve bought from any online store. The reviews, the ratings, any hotel you go to, B&B you book, people will look at those ratings. Although evidence and testimony has always been important, I think it’s increasingly not just important but essential. We talk about, leap number six – no proof – so making sure that any promise you make has some proof mapped to it. So anytime you say the words we do this, or our customers expect that, that’s the promise and always map some proof to that.

Then we break that down further into two types of proof, so there’s fact and there’s feeling. In an ideal world you need to juxtapose the two because either one on its own doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny. So…”We deliver X, Y, Z.” Fact, “90% of people think it’s great.” You go, “Yeah right. They could’ve made that stat up from anywhere.”

Or you go “We do X, Y, Z.” Testimonial; “X, Y, Z was great.” “Oh, that was their mates then was it.” But when you have the two, so when you have “We do X, Y, Z.” You have some fact and you have a feeling-based testimonial, that triangulation then allows people to go tick, tick, tick, get it.

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