How to Put the SPIN on Your Sales and Power Your Marketing

Most people consider sales to be “second class” work but in fact, it’s one of the key skills of success and a cornerstone of every marketing system out there.  Without sales, all marketing is a failure.

To get a clearer idea of how closely intertwined sales and marketing are, let’s first take a look at a definition of marketing.

The Marketing Formula

One of the best definitions of marketing is marketing = advertising + sales.

In other words, your job as a marketer is to attract prospective customers and then get them to trade their money for your products and services. Marketing to these customers is about listening to them and offering them the solution they’re seeking.   When you can get them to give you money for the solution you’re offering them, that’s when you have made a sale.  But there’s an art to getting to that point.

SPIN: The Psychology of Sales

The best and the most experienced salespeople know that to get a prospective customer to the point where they are willing to trade you money for your products and services, you need to ask a few situation questions first.

This is known as the model of SPIN, first put forth in a business book published by Neil Rackham in 1988, and still being used by top salespeople in the industry.

SPIN are a series of questions that flesh out:

Situation

Problem

Implication

Need payoff

These questions are all part of a consultative process that doesn’t threaten the customer and that also gets them involved in the whole process and engages them.  Once they find themselves involved and engaged, they start to establish trust with you and are now more likely to give you money for your products and services.

Live Customer Interaction

The whole key to making this process effective, of course, is having live, real-time interaction with the customer.  You need to get out there and talk to your customers.  Without this interaction, you’ll almost certainly never figure out how to offer them what they want or how to market and sell so that they buy.

The good marketer makes it his or her business to talk to, at least, 3 prospects per day live and the serious marketer makes it his or her business to interact with, at least, 10 prospects per day live.

First sales, then marketing

From one prospective, marketing can be thought of as “mass sales” and in order to understand how to market your product, it’s valuable to first sell your product.

After that you want to base your marketing on the universal “customer avatar” elements you discover.

Your “customer avatar”.

This was a concept developed by Eben Pagan, one of the most successful online internet marketers ever with his revenue annually exceeding twenty million dollars.

The “customer avatar” is based on the idea that people don’t like to spoken to as a group.  Instead, it is far better to group customers as one person with a specific set of qualities.

In order to find out what these qualities are, you need to start to communicate and interview them by e-mail, forums, phone, etc.  As you do, make copious notes on all observations and details you notice.

This will produce for you your “customer avatar”, an accurate picture and detailed description of exactly who your ideal customer is.  Once you know this valuable information and have it clearly defined on paper and as a visual, you will know exactly who to target.

But even better, you will know exactly how to speak to this customer to get them to respond to your offers and what questions you need to ask them to get them to the point of a sale.

This is how you would apply SPIN to your sales and power your marketing.

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Source: http://www.mlmtipsandadvice.com.au/put-spin-sales-power-marketing/

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