Creating Mindshare Drives Sales
Regardless of how great a sales team you have, the events that stimulate a prospective customers’ buying behavior are outside of your control. If a prospect doesn’t perceive a need for your product or service, you can call on them until you are blue in the face without success. They will only respond favorably if they believe you can help them solve their problems.
Problems come in many flavors: your prospective customer may be expanding their operations and need new equipment or components, they may have just had a request for a quotation that requires your product, or perhaps their vendor has just had a price increase, quality issues, or botched a delivery. Therefore you want to have your company’s products in front of prospects when a problem arises. This awareness will provide the greatest likelihood of success.
Competing for mindshare is critical to “having the door open when a sales opportunity arises.” When prospective customers read about your products as news in their industrial and technical magazines, publications, on various blogs and websites, they remember and respond. Whether your customer is an OEM, a distributor seeking a new line, a dealer, or an end-user, product news in these media outlets is the most cost-effective way to assure that - when a prospective customer has a need your product or service fills - you will be visible to them. Obviously, this increases the odds that they will contact you or that your sales call will be constructive.
Ideally, it would be nice to be physically in front of all prospective customers at all times. But that isn’t realistic; especially for small companies. The next best thing, of course, would be for you to be lucky enough to be making sales calls on the day when one of the above problems occurs. Being lucky, however, is not a business plan.
The best way to meet this challenge of creating mindshare is to maintain widespread visibility where it matters by implementing a well-executed product publicity campaign that targets a wide range of traditional and social media outlets.
To use a sports analogy, the relationship of product exposure and creating mindshare to sales calls is like the relationship of a left jab to a right cross in a boxing match. The better and more consistent the product publicity left jab, the more likely the sales call right cross will score a knockout punch.
Creating mindshare with an effective product publicity campaign to enhance sales opportunities is the one-two punch every successful business needs. It assures you that when a prospective customer’s level of interest piques to take action and buy; your product will be fresh on his or her mind. That is the importance of creating mindshare, the practical application of “branding.”