6 Steps to Marketing Your Service or Product

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Almost all business failures ultimately translate into failures in the marketing functions of the organization. Marketing is the pursuit of whatever and whomever provides the sustenance for the organization -- customers, clients, contracts, members, donors, contributors, volunteers, enlistees, or other results that represent successful accomplishments of the organizations mission. The major progressive steps are:

1. Decide (define/identify) exactly what you want to market -- what is your service?

Making your service too narrow limits your market -- the number of prospects. But making your service too broad dilutes and weakens your image as a consultant who is by definition a specialist and not a generalist.

2. Decide (define/identify) your market -- who you are going to sell to -- those who are the right prospects for your service.

3. Determine how you will reach those prospects with your presentation.

4. Define your specific offer

An offer is not what you wish to sell. The offer is what you promise to do for the client as a benefit resulting from your services, and it must be based on whatever you believe is the client's most ardent wish of end-result. It is the reason for retaining you and paying you. It is a recognition of the fact that the client wants the result, not the means to it. To define your offer properly is to understand the client's mind -- to know what benefit he or she hopes to achieve in retaining you.

5. Design your sales campaign

Prepare the sales material you need, and plan the methods and schedules.

6. Carry out your sales campaign

Discovering What Clients Wish to Buy

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How can we know what client's actually want. In some cases you can anticipate or estimate a client's wants accurately, but that is not always the case. When it is not, ask them. The following statements are true:

1. Everyone has problems

2. Everyone wants to solve those problems

3. Everyone has at least one problem that is more worrisome than the others, more urgently in need of solution

4. Everyone has desires, things they want to gain

5. Everyone has fears, things they want to avoid.

The key is to answer these questions concerning your prospects. In particular, what are the fears and possible gains most likely to inspire prospects to become clients. You must know what the problem is to make the most effective appeal -- to make the right offer. Identifying the problem to be solved is the key to developing the strategies of the marketing and sales campaign.

"I Know It When I See It."

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All of the above thoughts are based on the assumption that the client knows what they want -- recognizes not only the existence of a problem, but knows what the problem is and what is necessary to solve or eliminate it.

Creating a Demand

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If something obviously looks to good to be true, we hesitate since you've been taught all your life that only suckers fall for such things. But once someone else is willing to take a chance, on no better information than ours, then we tend to go along. The faster others get in, the faster it seems we want to. Our sense of what something is worth derives not from the intrinsic value of the object itself, but from the demand that has been created for that object.

In order to supply something, you must first create a demand.

One must create an atmosphere or creating conditions in which the customer wants what we have. The buyer should convince himself. You want it so the customer doesn't have to be told why your proposal is attractive. Nothing is more convincing than hard evidence that other want the same thing.

Ask yourself the following:

1. What is it I'm selling?

2. How do I create a demand for it?

3. Who am I selling it to and what do they really want?

Identifying the customer does not mean that you make your pitch directly to that customer. Sometimes we have to first sell the idea to the influencers around the customer. To create a climate around the customer that makes the decision in your favor easy without a downside.

When you know your customers, some of their special interests or characteristics, you always have a basis for contacting and talking to them. Besides your product, you can give the customer: recognition, respect, reliability, concern, service, a feeling of self-importance, friendship, help -- in other words -- things that all of us care about as human beings.

Buyers come prewired to regard your proposition with suspicion and cynicism. That's their job. It's your job to neutralize these feelings so you can get a fair hearing. People, not specs, will always be the key in determining whether you succeed.