More than one in three ICT providers believes success in upping sales win rates and deal sizes ultimately hinges on leaders becoming sticklers for educating buyers about their specific solutions.  This means that sales is not about selling anymore. It’s about building trust and educating.

Helping customers appreciate the benefits of your particular solutions is important because end users themselves are more knowledgeable. Today, more educated buyers put pressure on suppliers to “raise their game”. This is because buyers want more confidence in their potential suppliers. They want to be guided around potential pitfalls. Prospects want to understand the risks of adopting new technology and how to overcome them.

In this #HelpMe guide, we underline the reasons why imposing an upward ratchet of education is a sound rationale. And then we offer a practical action plan that puts you on course to drive the education agenda.

Chapters in this guide:

1. Warning: the wrong online presence will kill you
   by Adrian Bridgewater
2. What are your customers being told about you?
   by Adrian Bridgewater
3. Customers expect you to follow their roadmap, not yours
   by Ian Hunter
4. #HelpMe action plan
   by Dr. Lucy Green

Extract from “I want to educate buyers about my specific solutions” #HelpMe

This latter postmodern business era is a multi-layered vortex of interrelated information streams. A firm can refine and deliver its mission statement and message set inside the business 3.0 world, but this is only the first link in the chain.

What matters now is how those messages are received, absorbed, adopted and (perhaps most crucially of all) how they are reinterpreted through interconnected information channels across the web.

Suddenly it’s not just what you say to your customers that matters. It’s not even what your customers say about you after direct contact with your own representations – although that is of course important. We now go beyond those channels and start to consider what your customers are being TOLD about you through contact with other customers, your ex-employees, your partners and perhaps also your “non-customers” i.e. those prospects who have not decided to
purchase from you but are still vocal in the market and disseminating messages about their decision not to adopt your goods and/or services.