ct8282
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Upload & Sell: Off
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 Re: wow, awesome email inquiry | |
No problem at all Nektario.
You\'ve hit on some very poignant points in your post. Unfortunately most people do rely on their work to sell itself, but unless you are an industry leading brand, such as the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Trend, canon, Nikon, to name just a few you will need to work harder to ensure that you are maximising on sales opportunities and therefore maximising your businesses potential.
In this game there are the odd people who can now indeed rely on their brand/reputation to bring them business (think Tony Hoffer) but even the leaders have to be able to successfully operate all aspects of their business, which does indeed include selling.
I have read through lots of views and opinions on this thread, many people just told the OP to ignore her and that she wasn\'t worth wasting the time over. For me however, I believe that for the sake of spending 10 mins to write a solid \'need creation\'based response it is most definitely worth the effort because when done correctly it really is possible to make even the most vague of enquiries become a sale. As with anything it does take time and practice but once you have got the need creation technique nailed you will really find that your business will boom.
I\'m glad that you have clearly identified the potential of this strategy and better still that you have been able to relate it to other people who are very successful at what they do. Whilst they might not knowingly call their strategy need creation, i am in no doubt at all that their business success is built up around their ability to identify their clients needs and maximise on revenue as a result by offering their clients a solution that meets with that need.
You talk about \'adding value\' and this is a very innteresting point indeed. Value is purely based around perception and given the correct sales tools and strategy you can be very firmly in control of what a client perceives as \'good value\'. As part of our business activities we are constantly tasked with developing a \'value proposition\' that is specifically relevant to a certain client. We may be talking about the same product or service offering but each client has different \'needs\' and \'buying criteria\' so we have to ensure that the product or service is pitched in the correct way and taylors to their ongoing needs.
For the wedding photographers purposes, providing you are capable of delivering a quality \'solution\' to the clients need (or problem as previously discussed), if you start to look closely at the value proposition you are offering to your clients but more importantly how you offer that value proposition to ensure it fits with their needs you could easily bump your prices considerably and still find that the number of contracts/sales you get increases significantly. You are not delivering anything more than before which might justify the extra cost, but what you are doing is altering what the client perceives as good value and they will therefore be prepared to pay more.
In my industry my business is market leader in the UK, by a very significant margin. We are now at the stage where people use our Brand name when they are referring to what our systems are. What I mean is that when people want to buy a Building Management System they will often say they want to buy a Trend system. However, our product is not better than our competitors. In some applications it may even be worse, but the customer perceives far greater value from buying our products and buying into our brand. Our products carry a premium price point compared to all of our competition but the customers are happy to pay the price premium as they see greater value in our products and services. The reason being, they appear to get much better after purchase support, much better supply and security of supply with components, better training, etc etc, so all in all their experience in dealing with us is perceived to be better than when dealing with the competition. Are we better, chances are in some respects we\'re not, but we invest heavily in making sure that the customer believes that we are. The net result now is that people will usually come to Trend in the first instance when they decide they want to purchase a building management system. Wouldn\'t it be nice to have people phoning you the first instance they decide they want a wedding photographer? Yes, the other guy charges $1000 less but the customer perceives your offering to be better value because you took the time to run through the Need Creation process and truly identify what the client really wants. The other chap just spouted off for an hour about how great he was, how expensive his camera gear was, and how awesome at wedding photography he is. Well he might be awesome, but if the customer doesn\'t believe that he will supply a product that meets intimately with their needs they will most likely look elsewhere.
Of course, I would be happy to provide more info on need creation or share my sales experience if you think it will help you. Drop me a PM if you wish to talk more.
Best regards :-)
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