Personalize it!

Don’t we as sales professionals wish we could put together a meeting or proposal with its decks and brochures and videos and stuff and then just say “Personalize it” — like we do at a fast-food restaurant when we have the opportunity to “Super Size It?”

I’m sure you, like us, keep seeing research coming from analysts, bloggers, and even your own marketing department, saying that “Personalizing your content will get your prospects to engage with you.” How many of you have seen something like this? I bet at least 90% of you (those that are always trying to keep the edge and increase sales).

Here at Illumineto, personalization begins with laying out the content in a manner that screams “ENGAGEMENT!”. Having a founder that put together a North American sales team doesn’t hurt with that message either. His experience and huge success had personalization as one of his mantra’s to his sales teams.

“Don’t be a “fire and forget” sales rep — be a sales-rep that makes it personal for the prospect.”

Address their needs. Don’t waste their time. Listen to them. And provide content that gets them down the sales path quicker.

If you’ve used our product Spark, you can see how this mantra of his is blended throughout the product.

Many of you don’t have the time to make it personal — but, I have to counter that argument with “Don’t you write a personal greeting in your emails to a prospect?” Even if you just met with them three hours before? Of course you do. Well, maybe you don’t and you just send an email that says “Hey John, here’s the stuff”, add some content, and click send. But for the rest of you, you guys write a nice greeting, thanking them for their time, placing a paragraph or two explaining how the attachments answers their questions, and so forth, right?

That is one aspect of what sales is all about — engaging with your prospect through personalization.

Helping them down their decision process, as quickly as possible (so they will only have the opportunity to work with you), is what Spark brings to the table. In fact, it’s hard to use Spark and not make is personal — you would have to go out of your way to make it so.

Why not increase your sales revenue by letting Spark make it personal for you — you are already doing the personal greeting, why not go ahead and couch that in Spark’s setting so that the story can be told much more easily?

Yeah, this post kinda devolved down into a product pitch, and I really try to not write them to be so — but, at times, when there is no comparable product out there to show how you can increase your sales and be this quarter’s hero, I will have to default to Spark and let it speak for itself.

Good luck out there and don’t forget to engage through personalization.