by Carl Ingalls
What kind of marketing would fit with High Probability Selling? A lot of marketing methods are designed to persuade people to buy a product or service, and they often present a very unbalanced picture of the strengths and weaknesses of what they are pushing. This is contrary to the way we train people to sell.
Selling and marketing are different. However, if persuasion and telling less than the whole truth don’t work in selling as well as many people believe, then how well do they really work in marketing?
This is not a rhetorical question. We struggle with this every day, and we really would like to know what our readers think. Many of you have a lot of experience using our selling process, and have a deep understanding of what it means.
We do have a few ideas for marketing HPS, and we will discuss them in upcoming blog posts. Meanwhile, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Author
I think HPS prospecting already uses the appropriate kind of HPS marketing – namely, keep it short and tell the truth. When you state the two features in an offer, that’s a bit of marketing. One of the reasons that bit of marketing works is that it is short and true.
Steve,
Are you suggesting that we use High Probability Prospecting Offers to market HPS? As you know, a High Probability Prospecting Offer is very short and direct, designed to get to the point very quickly when talking with a prospect on the phone. You’ve got me thinking about how this might be adapted to various marketing channels.
We do offer a workshop that trains and coaches people on High Probability Prospecting. What do you think of the idea of creating a webpage that contains several prospecting offers for that workshop?
Thank you for your thoughts,
Carl Ingalls
Good marketing starts the same way that HPS and Prospecting do. You create that unique selling proposition and make it as clear and concise as possible. Ideally it is done it a way that will have someone looking for additional information if it fits what they are looking for. If it isn’t what they are looking for then that is fine as well.
I see little if any difference in whether you’re “selling” or “marketing”.
The best description I have seen of the distinction between selling and marketing is that marketing brings people to the table, while selling gets them to sign the cheque. Notice, however, that even the language used in this description implies that the provider does something ‘to’ the buyer — and here is where we run into trouble with either traditional selling or marketing. The power of high probability selling (and also why it’s consistent with The Essential Message) is that, at most, it helps to awaken a need or want in the buyer, and at least, respects the buyer to be fully in control of his or her faculties to take it from there. As the name suggests, HPS understands that selling (and marketing) is even more of a numbers game than traditional selling teaches: it seeks to identify those potential customers who would buy ‘if only they knew’. Rather than focus on conversion rate, perhaps it can coin a new term — ‘identification rate’.