Befriend Your Prospects First, Talk Sales Later

As you know, B2B marketing is often a long-term endeavor. With complex sales and decisions-by-committee, it can take months – even years – to turn prospects into customers.

So why would you want to make the process even longer? Well, patience has its rewards, provided you effectively nurture each lead from the start.

Brian Carroll touched on this in an excellent post recently at B2B Lead Generation. The gist of his message was to buck the tradtional sales practice of waiting to talk with prospects until they’re ready to buy. Instead, establish a relationship with them before they’re considering to buy.

No sales pitches necessary at that point. Just friendly conversation to familiarize yourselves with each other and lay the groundwork to what may become a highly beneficial relationship for you both.

It goes back to the “people buy from people” motto. No matter how superior your product or service, the final decision almost always comes down to trust and believeability.

Simple conversations can be a powerful marketing tactic. Provide your prospects with valuable, useful insights and information initially, and save the sales talk for later. When they view you as a trusted advisor, your messages will resonate. They’ll be much more receptive to you, and more likely to ignore the typical sales pitches from your competitors.

After all, lead nurturing is a lot like courtship. You didn’t propose on the first date, did you?