eNOISE

In last week’s episode, This Place is Death, while Ben and Jack toiled away to get the Oceanic Six together and off to the lovely Eloise Hawking for some much needed inspiration, our time-challenged group on the island found themselves skittering across space-time at an alarming pace, with increasingly painful side-effects as things progressed.

Poor Charlotte, Juliet, Miles and even Sawyer… hemorrhaging more and more with each blistering flash and jump through time.

Once at the Orchid station (or rather, the mysterious well, as Charlotte directed), Locke had his grand master plan to fix things:  to somehow make his way off the island, bring the Oceanic Six and co. back, and get his lonely band of misfits un-unstuck in time… somehow.

As Locke prepared to lower himself down the well to nowhere, Juliet states rather simply;

“If whatever you’re trying to do works… thank you.”

She has no idea what Locke is about to do, or how exactly he’s planning to get it done.  But, here she is going through excruciating head trauma, nosebleeds, and I’m sure all-around weirdness on an increasingly regular basis… all she’s concerned about is a solution to the problem.

While I’m sure there’s all sorts of legal faux-pas’s around inflicting head trauma, nosebleeds and time/space displacement upon our unsuspecting prospects… in the sales context, when prospecting we should be doing everything in our power to help them to understand the depth of their problems, implications, and with a little effort build that same level of anticipation for the proposed solution - the solution you’re equipped to provide.  The solution that solves their problem like none other.

In fostering this anticipation, you build a connection with customers that reaches an almost emotional level that can truly set yourself apart from your competitors.

Not unlike the must-see movie trailers, the rich aroma wafting at you as you set foot in the coffee shop, or that incessant speculation you’re going through between episodes of Lost… anticipation pulls you towards the irresistible end-result.

What can you do with your current customers and prospects to make yourself and your solution irresistible?  What tactics might we employ to move prospects from concerned…to hemorrahaging?

Last week in Sales and Marketing Lessons from LOST – the beginning, I tried to set the stage for a series of sales and marketing tips drawn from themes ideas and concepts in the television series Lost. For me it’s really about bringing together things that are of great interest to me personally, and using that as my muse.

While this week’s episode “This Place is Death” brought me a few wonderful nuggets to work with, I feel compelled to elaborate on what I touched on last week.

Draw Them In

My last post touched briefly on Lost’s incredible ability to hook and draw in new viewers.  When we apply the concept to business, we’re all striving for the same things in a great deal of our prospecting effort.  We too aim to draw them in through some initial form of contact either via our websites, blogs, mailers, billboards events, cold calls, etc.
Across the board, regardless of our ultimate big hairy goal for each of these methods, part of that approach is hoping to hook the audience – either as a means to an end, or as the end itself.

Capture | Captivate | Compel | Cultivate

In the context of business by phone - and specifically B2B prospecting -  a prospector’s opening statement provides the framework in which a cold call grabs your prospect’s attention, and sets the stage for a business conversation.

Within few precious seconds prospects will determine whether or not they’re willing to spend any time at all listening or acknowledging you. Without a strong opening statement, that conversation doesn’t happen. Or what’s worse in many scenarios, the conversation does happen, but since you haven’t truly captured their attention, you’re speaking with a prospect who’s half-participating, half-focused on what they were in the middle of doing when you called… in these scenarios you’re drawing dead anyway, but wasting more of your precious time the process.

If the goal is to go into a meaningful, authentic business conversation, your opening statement needs to more than simply grant you permission to talk. You need to do everything possible to ensure you have an interested and enthusiastic participant in the conversation.

Capture:

• How do we create enough interest so that they will willingly and eagerly participate in discussion?
• You must answer the burning question, “What’s in it for me?” for the listener, or they will immediately begin the getting-rid-of-you process.
• In SPIN Selling, one of the keys to an effective opening statement is providing a “Buyer-centered purpose for the call”.  This means more than just a pretty value proposition about reducing costs, boosting performance or increasing somethingility.  This “buyer-centered purpose” needs to be more intimate.  This needs to be something that relates specifically to this person at this company at this time.  Do your homework, and tell them what’s really in it for THEM.

Captivate:

• When you’re in discussion, how do you keep them “on the hook”? How do you prevent prospects from deflating or getting fatigued as you continue?
• Even if your opening captures their attention and bring them into the conversation, if the context of your discussion doesn’t meet the expectations, you’ll lose them.
• Intrigue is key. In the sales profession, we inherently need to know everything about our product or solution, but your prospect only needs to know what they need to know. Unless you know exactly what they need to know, less is more…
• Breed curiosity with concise value propositions and benefit statements that beg questions from your prospect. Questions they ask will help you to identify what’s troubling them, or where their interests lie.
• Leave them wanting more.

Compel:

• Compel them to take action. What action? Depends on what you’re after. Are you driving for an appointment, demo, attending a webinar, etc.?
• What about Plan B? Despite your best intentions, you can expect some less positive outcomes. How do you make the less positive outcome more positive? Identify an intermediate action or next step or two you may fall back on. In doing so you can maintain momentum, and reduce any evaporation that happens after your first conversation.

Cultivate

• Where do we go from here? Once we’ve experienced success on our first touch, how do we maintain it across the life of the sales cycle and beyond? Are we captivating and compelling at each stage of the game?
• What else can we do to water this so it continues to grow?
• For prospects that evaporate, what tactics do you have lined up to go back and revisit and revive?

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock…

“LOST is an American serial drama television series. It follows the lives of plane crash survivors on a mysterious tropical island, after a commercial passenger jet flying between Sydney, Australia and Los Angeles, United States crashes somewhere in the South Pacific. For its first three seasons each episode typically featured a primary storyline on the island as well as a secondary storyline from a previous point in a character’s life, though the introduction of shifts forward in time and other time-related plot devices changed this formula somewhat in later seasons. The pilot episode was first broadcast on September 22, 2004 and since then four full seasons have aired, with the fifth currently in progress. The show airs on the ABC Network in the United States, as well as on regional networks in many other countries.” (Wikipedia)

For me, LOST is somewhere in the realm between guilty pleasure and outright obsession. When it first aired, I couldn’t be bothered to watch, and even as buzz started to build up and water-cooler-conversation ran rampant, I refused to allow myself to be pulled into the abyss.  At least at first.  When ABC’s Lost was in its infancy, I too had a beautiful newborn baby to tend to… and to clean up after, and to lose sleep to, etc…

Needless to say, I was very selective in my TV choices, and all else that involved “free” time.
But eventually, I had to cave it. It was destined to happen… and I mean that more than just as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the recurring “destiny” theme on the show.

For years, my wife and I had abstained from paying for cable.  Really, the non-cable idea was as much a personal decision as it was a financial one at the time. We didn’t want to have the television as the focal point of the home and at the time were more interested in movies and film as a pastime – rather than throwing on whatever happened to be on to pass the time at a fixed monthly cost with very little perceived value.  (That is of course until a new HDTV finally justified the need “premium content”.  And as an aside, Hockey Night in Canada has never been the same since, and I appreciate every minute of it)

And so, at the time, I was left with a very small number of options… and it was merely a matter of time before I was “stuck” watching an episode of LOST… and found myself drawn in.

And that’s the very point.

As marketers, when we’re reaching out to new prospects, the goal is more than just making contact. We need to draw them in.

We need to grab their attention, keep it, and drive them towards the next step in the funnel, all with the hopes of building and maintaining a fruitful customer relationship.

Capture. Captivate. Compel. Cultivate.