Take a moment to think about fly fishing for an instant (bear with me, I do have a commercial point to make here). Fly fishing’s success is determined by aligning three factors, which are: 1.) the fish they’d like to catch, 2)) the type of fly they employ, and) casting or method they use to give their fly in order to catch the fish. The better the anglers determine these three aspects as they are, the greater chance chances of success they’ll have.
The same challenges you face. Your success depends on your ability to select and win more of your most valuable customers. Just like the fisherman who chooses your angle (target customers) and then chooses the fly (the benefits they are looking for) and create your casting (your sales process). You must then explain these benefits to your salespeople. Why? Because you’re fishing by yourself. If you’re not cautious, your salespeople may be enticed by anyone they can get in touch with and begging for bigger areas, price concessions, discounts, and terms that can reduce your earnings.
Step 1 The Fish: Define your most sought-after clients.
Your ideal clients are your most profitable, most risk-free, and the lowest cost to serve (relative to what they pay), Most reliable, predictable, and the most loyal customers. When you identify your ideal customer, you’re telling yourself, “Here’s who we’re set up to serve best” and “Here’s who we’re not set up to serve well.”
What are the criteria you use to define the ideal client? The first step is to evaluate your profitability and the growth of your existing customers (divided by geography, industry, growth rate, or any other factors that are meaningful to your own). Next, you should look for common traits of your highest-profit customers.
Demographics – This is the person they are according to age, gender, geographic location, relatives, characteristics of the family, ethnicity, and other indicators.
Psychographics refers to their decision-making process:
What are the challenges they face? What issues are they trying to address?
What can they do to recognize that it’s the right time to confront the issues? What are the conditions?
What are the advantages or outcomes they looking for when they purchase?
What is important to them in regards to the way they search for solutions or the manner in which they are implemented?
Why do they purchase from you instead of your competitors? (For instance: less time to wait, the satisfaction of conducting business with you, special products or services, cost?)
Why do you lose sales? What stage of your sales process does it usually come to an end?
When you are defining the perfect customer’s profile, beware of the trap of selecting the common demographic factors of the type of business, age income, the zip code (e.g., dentists who are successful in their middle age in zipping 02109) simply because you can get the information easily or simply because they are easy to understand. You and your team must work more than that. Ask why and how you’re deciding to select specific features.
Consider the other direction as well: Do you understand why your leads aren’t turning into customers? What point in your sales process do they leave? When you connect with a banker for business or going through your branch, do customers leave? At what point of the process of identifying and presenting do you typically lose clients? You can rely on your intuition, but make sure you have specific, precise information to validate your intuition and serve as a basis to compare over the course of.
Step 2 – The Fly Create and tell an engaging value story.
Like a fly angler choosing an appropriate fly depending on the kind of fish, the time of day, season, and the particular characteristics of the stream select your value story to attract your ideal clients. Your most valuable prospects, when they hear this story the very first time, will see themselves in your tale and learn the benefits they desire in such a way that they feel encouraged to make a bank deposit with you.
To accomplish this effect To achieve, you must write your story with care and repeat it consistently, in the same way, to ensure you are attracting those you are looking for and can determine whether your story is effective or not. There are numerous methods to create your “why should I bank with you?” compelling value story. Here’s an illustration:
Template for scripts: MyBank is in the business of providing the prospective target customers with a certain benefit #1. What I refer to is that nearly all target prospect group members we’ve had the pleasure of meeting are experiencing problems or discomfort faced by the target group members but not receiving benefit #1 or another related benefit. Do you ever wish that you had that benefit but didn’t know what to do? This is exactly what we offer at MyBank, and we offer you the chance to avail of benefits #1 or a related benefit at the time you’d like.
Examples: MyBank is in the business of providing small-scale business owners the flexibility and capability to track their business from anywhere across the globe anytime. What I refer to is that most small-scale business owners we’ve had the pleasure of meeting worry about how they are unable to observe, but also take action regarding the deposit of receipts from customers quickly, making payments to their vendors on time times, and making sure they have enough cash in their bank in case they go on vacation (if they ever decide to take one) or tangled up at a job for a customer for a couple of days. Have you ever thought you could manage that but didn’t know what to do? This is exactly the job we do here at MyBank, and we provide you with the ability to view and monitor what’s happening within your business in the event that you have to be away from your office for a short period of time.
Of course, this tale might not be appealing either to the person you are or one of your clients. It is important to create and validate your own stories. The problem is: Do you have an idea? Does every member of your team know how to convey this story in the same manner? Do you have a way to check the story and see whether there are alternative ways to tell it that work better or speedier?
Step 3 The Cast: Define your sales process.
The final stage of our story of fly-fishing is casting. This is when the angler offers his fly for the fishing. The most experienced fly fishermen are practicing their casting techniques for hours, aiming to bring the fly precisely to the right location at the right time, using an action that appears to the fish just as the fly or bug they are looking for to eat for breakfast. Your sales team and you must work on polishing and refining the motion of your casting until you have a stable, steady, and predictable method of attracting your fish towards the surface and encouraging them to bite.
This is the process of adapting your knowledge about your ideal clients into tools, steps, and actions that tell your potential clients they are “we’re the ones for you” and then test them until you’re confident that your strategy is consistent. The most successful strategies become your sales strategy to attract your ideal clients.
The goal of the sales process is not to send your salespeople into a frenzy however it might. It’s to boost your profit and revenue by consistently and consistently atturing more of your top prospects and keeping the best customers. If you notice certain questions lead to greater outcomes than other types of questions or different sequences of questions, then the questions and sequences become an integral part of your strategy. In the same way, if a certain display or a particular conversation you have while you’re making the sale yield better results, they will become part of your process.
