More Services
By: Jill Konrath
Reviewed By: Bob Ruffolo
People today are busier than ever before. Despite the fact that technology has made life so much easier for us, we live in a culture that loves being busy, so it’s not likely that people will be slowing down anytime soon.
With most people constantly feeling frazzled and distracted, it’s hard to gain the attention of prospects to sell our products and services. Thankfully, Jill Konrath has set out to provide a solution to this problem in her book SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales and Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers.
“SNAP Selling” is a formula that you can model when approaching your persona with your product or service. SNAP is a loose acronym that’s explained below:
Because people are busy and the average customer (B2C or B2B) is more savvy to marketing tactics than ever before -- prospects naturally have their guard up when approached by a company.
They’re immediately trying to decide if what you're offering is worth their time even hearing about, the hassle of implementing it, and finally, if what you offer is the best option available.
This book will show you how to get in your persona’s head and address all of those questions quickly and if you’ve done everything correctly, they’ll feel that they made their own conclusions about you without your influence.
It sounds like manipulation, but really it’s just smart marketing psychology that addresses the most common concerns in a purchasing decision at the right time.
It sounds like manipulation, but really it’s just smart marketing psychology that addresses the most common concerns in a purchasing decision at the right time.
The SNAP sales toolkit allows you to understand your buyer persona, their decision-making process, and how to apply the SNAP methodology.
People today have busy schedules and they’re always looking for ways to fit more activities into smaller windows of time. This might have positive effects on productivity, but it also makes people more frazzled.
As a result, people have become more:
People are frazzled and under a lot of pressure, even if that pressure is self-imposed. You have to take the time to understand how to bypass these barriers in your buyer persona or else your message will go unheard and you’ll remain completely off their radar.
Frazzled prospects will be asking themselves four questions about the product or service that you offer:
The four SNAP factors (and rules) directly address these four questions.
Keep it Simple. Your goal is to simplify everything as much as possible. Your sales message should be simple and your product or service should be easy to understand (based on how you present it).
Be Invaluable. Your buyer persona wants to work with an expert who specializes in their field. Present them with new and creative ideas on a regular basis -- ideally, you want to become a resource of information to them. At that point, you become invaluable to them and the choice between you and your competitor becomes obvious.
Always Align. You need to immediately establish an obvious connection between what you’re selling and what your persona is trying to accomplish. Your persona doesn’t care about you or your brand until they understand what’s in it for them.
Raise Priorities. Your persona is bombarded with sales pitches and marketing materials from lots of other companies. You have to do everything you can to ensure that your offering is the highest priority. This is going to require ongoing attention because your persona’s priorities will change over time.
Brands that sell more successfully know their ideal customer -- who they are, what they do, how they think, and what they want/need.
There are four steps for getting your in customer’s head and seeing your product from their perspective:
Buyer’s Matrix
Name _____________________
Title _______________________
There are three important decisions that your buyer persona will make when they consider building a working relationship with you. Using the information that you’ve gathered, it’s up to you to make these decisions easy for your persona to make, and ideally, you want these decisions to work in your favor.
Decision #1 -- Do I allow this person access?
To get your persona interested enough to invest their time in hearing what you have to say, you have to move them from being oblivious to curious.
To accomplish this you need to:
Decision #2 -- Should I initiate change?
Humans are resistant to change and especially in organizations, where change disrupts the status quo, it can be difficult to get everyone on board. With this decision, you are trying to move your persona from being complacent to being committed to change.
To inspire commitment from your buyer persona, you will need to present your business case that clearly addresses the following three concerns:
Decision #3 -- How do I select the best use of our own resources?
To close the sale, you will have to convince your persona that you are the best option for them. You will need to move them from being open to different options to becoming certain that you are the best option to invest their resources in.
Helping your persona make this decision requires that you analyze the SNAP process and make sure that you have executed it properly and that you continue to do so.