So You Want More Sales?

A very reasonable concern that is typically brought to us here at Frame Concepts is the concern that sales targets are slipping. And the client wants an approach to bringing in more sales. And almost immediately two narratives emerge. One is the “nobody gets us” type concern and the other is “we need immediate results that will hit the bottom-line” for this new program. And my immediate reaction is if you want one, you need both.

Getting Your Audience Engaged with Your Offering Can Be Challenging – Visual Solutions are Key

What are the Two Sides of Your Go-to-Market Strategy?

Your go-to-market effort represents a two-edged sword to bring your marketplace – from raw awareness, to point of view engagement, to solution understanding and to company engagement.

Traditionally there is product marketing or product positioning and then there are the tactical lead generation programs. The product marketing content is typically placed on the solutions section of your website and sales presentation and brochures. The lead program content of course is integrated in your integrated channels – email automation, social, display etc.. Both programs are created around answering one core question for both sides of the go-to-market house. On the product marketing side, you explicitly want to tell how your offering provides differentiated value to your chosen market segments. With the lead programs, you are cleverly offering guidance for your marketplace audience segments that reflects your unique approach so they are drawn to learn more about your offering that underpin your point of view. And of course if you have not set up your site to explain your offerings in an intuitive and engaging fashion to drive them to your call to action (free demo, consultation etc), then you are wasting your time and money. Your go-to-market effort represents a two-edged sword to bring your marketplace – from raw awareness, to point of view engagement, to solution understanding –  and finally to company engagement.

A Sample of a Process Solution Pictogram

Having Your Cake and Eat it Too

The bad news is that it takes time to set up both. The good news is that you can do them in parallel. We like to take a step back before we begin and do a scoping sketch to show to our clients (and ourselves) how the core solution explanations will play off the lead programs. The classic (we have been doing this for a few years now) is to offer up a 60-90 second animation reel to get their audience at a high level what makes them different than traditional offerings. And then to get more detail on how the offering process goes and how specifically it delivers value, we offer up the integrated solution pictogram. We can then offer up any reference information for the more technical audience in library section of the site. And thats it. You do not want to give TOO much – you wan them to reach out after they get the basics and are intrigued but they want to know if you would work for THEIR situation.

A Sample Scoping Sketch

But of Course You Have to Funnel Them In

And so we think about what channels – if not all of them – our client’s audience like to learn about solutions to their business problems. And we typically create an editorial calendar around timely topics and the mighty infographic serves as the visual content engine. The infographic is effective for content programs as they are readily digestible for you busy attention distracted audience and they are highly sharable for that free viral lift. On the production end, we need to create the creative html email and landing page for marketing automation and the banner and landing page for display and the blog post and linking for social programs – but all of them drive to an infographic as the content download. And of course your blog section of your website will house each edition of your new content program. And the overall effect as your start to integrate to your audience is that your marketplace starts to wonder how is it that you have such provocative and non-intuitive conclusions, success stories and points of view. One click over to your product section of your website – there they will have their visual answer. In that magic moment they come to terms with the “how” of your solution and the “why” they need to engage.

Infographics are the Visual Content Engine for Lead Programs

And Then There are the Leads – Consulting Instead of Selling

And so when you engage with your inbound audience, you have a visually engaged audience armed with the basics of your offering AND your point of view. And then they have questions about their situation. This now has the air of a consulting engagement then a sale presentation. Sales people like to consult better than to sell. Sales people dislike presenting to an audience that does not have a clue of why they should even care about their company and their offering. When you have visually engaged your prospect so they get the vision – they see the value proposition – you chances for conversion go dramatically up. And visual solutions work well for consulting and the change management that has to happen for their company to get onboard. And visuals will support the client setup steps as well. With visuals its all good.

If you would like to learn how the Frame Concepts Visual Solutions can get your marketplace onboard, click here for a Free Demo and Consultation.