How to change anyone's mind (and influence their buying decisions)
Your prospects are bombarded with sales approaches from your competitors. To stand out doesn’t mean matching the promotional activities of your rivals; rather, you can achieve much more than them by doing less with this simple trick: add value to the everyday lives of your target customers. Here’s how.
In Clearly’s latest customer survey (July 2024), we asked clients a series of questions to determine the value that we deliver. After all, we sell ourselves as a value-based agency and so it is important that clients feel that we are delivering on that promise. Doing so creates a sense of de-risking their investment in us, reinforces their decision to work with us, and helps sustain their PR budget over the long-term.
Each of the questions asked related to certain aspects of the service we provide for them, from the quality of the work we produce, and creative ideas generated, to our understanding of their business, its objectives, and the contribution that these outputs have on helping them to achieve their desired outcomes.
Most satisfying was that 100% of clients ‘agree’ or ‘strongly agree’ that our work delivers positive business results, such as boosting awareness of their brand, driving new leads, and supporting their overall growth.
It is perhaps therefore not too surprising to learn that 7 in 10 clients renew their contracts at least once and one-third increase their spend with us by taking on additional services, such as crisis communications or executive profiling.
The point of sharing the backdrop above is this:
As an organisation operating in one of the most challenging of times with sluggish markets and increased competition, you need more than a great product or service to pull away from the pack.
Indeed, you need to ensure that what you do delivers real value to the customers (including internal employees), investors, and stakeholders you want to engage with.
How to add value (and win big)
We’ll use the Recruitment sector to illustrate this point. It is one that we have operated heavily in for over 10 years and our recruitment client portfolio includes several agencies who are among the biggest in the world. Some are outright market leaders; others aspire to become so and are hot on the coat tails of their competitors.
They call upon us to help them to create the value that drives client engagement and build their sales pipelines and we do this be creating a sense of value.
One of the most powerful ways we do this is to use data – either that which is acquired by a customised market research project we have conducted for them, or statistics they already have access to.
Take the example of a major specialist tech recruitment firm. They share the data on all hires made during the previous 12 months.
We then analyse this information and turn it into a series of annual salary reports for each of the three markets they operate – UK, EU, and US. We build a campaign around to promote the reports across multiple channels, which includes:
- Articles penned on behalf of their key experts within the business.
- Whitepapers and guides that extrapolate some of the key findings in the reports and dive deeper into them, such as variances in the number of women entering the tech industry or trends on the appointment of other under-represented groups to senior roles.
- Digital assets such as infographics, videos, and podcasts.
- Press releases sent to targeted media outlets that increase exposure of our client’s brand and awareness of the insights they have uncovered.
These can all be shared with their prospects at various touchpoints, such as weekly emails, newsletters, social media, and pitched to the industry press. In other words, it is about sharing valuable content in ways that your prospects want to receive it.
How adding value influences buyer decisions
Clients make buying decisions based on four key factors:
- Expertise of the seller
- Experience
- Authority in their space, and
- Trustworthiness
Sticking with our example of the recruitment company, by creating and sharing their insights in the ways outlined above, they:
- Demonstrate their sector expertise as having a finger on the pulse of what is happening in their industry. And by interpreting the data to explain what it means and why it matters to their target audience they enamour themselves as true industry specialists and thought leaders.
- Can reference similar client projects they have worked on that showcase their experience in delivering real value.
- Enable their prospects to make better informed hiring and business decisions that will boost their prospects. This creates a sense of connection and trust between them and their customers based on an understanding of the challenges and pains they face, which in turn builds authority as a go-to provider of choice.
When you consider the needs and pains of your prospects and take the opportunity to add value to their day in some way, you really can change anyone’s mind.
We’ve been successfully doing this for organisations with annual revenues ranging from £1 million a year to £1 billion for more than 10 years. It works for them; it will work for you too.
