How to Interact with an Ultra Busy Prospect

From the Prospect

“Occasionally a savvy marketer captures my attention and gets me to ask for more information and even entices me to request a meeting. They are completely focused on my business and the impact they can have on it. That’s what is relevant to me—not their offering.”

Some Ideas

Focusing on Benefits

Focus on the prospect’s business and the impact you can have and suggest that benefits can make a difference, i.e., increasing productivity, helping reduce waste, being more cost effective, or working with legacy equipment.

Benefits could be the competitive advantage!

Creating a Competitive Advantage

A competitive advantage happens when one company offers something no one else is offering. For example, if a manufacturer can reduce the cost of producing an automobile, that company has a few marketing choices. It can dramatically reduce the price over its competitors or keep the existing price on future models. Those savings can be used to bolster their existing margins (keeping stockholders happy) and at the same time, it can stabilize the future market price.

Unfortunately, when many companies do the same thing, the competitive advantage disappears. New technologies may afford the manufacturer the opportunity to offer advantages other than price, i.e., increased safety, higher quality, and increased mpg.

Let’s Do Some Homework

Competitive Analysis

In addition to meeting with and listening closely to the prospect, suggest that you do a competitive analysis of their company and their markets. How are they seen by their competitors and by potential customers? Are there new markets they could focus on?

Create a matrix of five or six criteria to measure each competitor against, i.e., market share, promotion expenditures, etc. Then use the same process on the prospect’s company and see where they rank.

Why are you better?

Ask the prospect (or client by now), for the names of five of their top customers. Contact each of them and ask, “Why, other than price, are you doing business with this company?” History has shown that many of the resultant answers may be similar suggesting a new strategy that might attract other prospects in the same field.