Gaining your prospect’s attention is only the first hurdle in the sales journey

Getting someone’s attention is what it’s all about in sales. If you don’t gain their attention, you have lost before you’ve even began.

How do you get a prospect’s attention? Well, here’s some approaches that come to my mind:

• Receiving phone calls and emails every freakin’ day until I finally pick-up and tell them not to call me again (which, depending on my mood, may end up with me buying what their selling).
• Sending a nice gift along with a presentation to convince them to give me a call (usually a USB drive with information on it).
• Having marketing set up a “campaign” of wooing a prospect on a monthly basis, like the first month an incredible/creative letter (yes, letter, not email) is sent with some unique code or item in it to get them to interact with a site (or company), and so on.
• Personally stopping by and sitting in their lobby until they meet with me.

You get the idea — we all have different ways to get someone’s attention.

In fact, some of our competitors and other “lost souls” consider getting someone’s attention to be engagement. At Illumineto, we disagree — just because someone is holding my dog hostage does not mean that I am going to “engage” with them, this time or ever.

But, there is a way to get my attention without taking my dog hostage — and that’s by putting money in my pocket (or taking it out, either will get me to take notice).

As I continue my career in sales and marketing, I continue to see efforts by professionals that forget this simple mantra. If you aren’t telling your prospect why or how your product or service can save them money, why be in sales?

So, as a side note, I was having this discussion with a young sales professional (young!!! like, wet behind the ears young) and I mentioned this to him — to always appeal to the buyer by putting money in their pocket.

Of course, he came back with, “But we’re the most expensive product on the market! We aren’t saving them money.”

Wow.

Yeah, if you have been in sales long enough, you know the arguments to that, and of course, I gave him all of those arguments, where he started to grasp that cost is rarely the issue in getting a prospect engaged. In fact, the longer he could hold off on pricing and sell the values of the product, the better (but, I’m preaching to the choir, right?).

At Illumineto, we consider the whole sales process to be important for engagement — from getting their attention to closing the deal — the complete sales process (don’t get this confused with the marketing cycle, where so much prospecting and qualifications occur, this is not sales engagement).

We built Illumineto Spark to get someone’s attention (it definitely does — have you spoken to your prospect after receiving their first Spark page? We haven’t heard a single person say it wasn’t engaging or attention getting).

Think about it? Today, you send an email, and you have their attention for that moment while they review what you sent, then, respond with more questions or concerns. And then, you hope to gain their attention again and will respond to the next email you send them, and so forth. Yes, we all do it, and today, it works — because that’s the way it has always been done. (For a great post on this, click here.)

But today is fading — new technologies and millennials are taking over the sales process — they want the information all in one place, they don’t want to be bothered with dozens of emails, and they don’t want to have to go back and ask for more information — it’s all about “I want it now and I want it right.”

The technology behind Spark gives your prospects the right information the first time, which leads to immediate attention and engagement.

Who wouldn’t want that? If you do, check out Spark — it’s free and the only thing that’s going to happen is the winning of more deals.