One of my favourite all time tunes is “A Day in the Life” by The Beatles. It recalls the tripped out day that both Paul McCartney and John Lennon had. While Lennon’s lyrics were inspired by contemporary newspaper articles, McCartney’s lyrics were based on reminiscences about his youth.
It was a day in the life.
This is something we need to do for our customers. The ultimate empathy test. Since they’re now in full control of the buying and we just facilitate that, we need to have an understanding as to how they buy, so imagine a day in the life of your buyer.
So, for example, say you sell mortgages and protection to help people secure their home.
Where does your customer go, what sites do they search, what words do they put into the search engines? Who do they talk to, which social network do they use most to see recommendations, which aggregator sites attract them? And so on.
Next you devise a sales process that merely helps them along the way. Provide online materials to give them the answers they need, provide information in the form of videos and let them find you and connect with you in the way they prefer.
For example, we sell an online package that helps people pass a particular mortgage exam. We sell it online with no human interaction at all. Our potential customers go online and search with Google and visit YouTube, online forums and Facebook. And I know they like to get things for free.
So we pay Google some money for pay per click advertising using specific keywords; this brings them to our various sites. On YouTube we have a number of free videos which answer all their questions. People searching for the exams often want to know how to get into the mortgage sector which is incredibly regulated. So we answer these questions on videos, lots of them, recorded by me. We have free email lists where they can get a free question sent every day. On Facebook we have articles and videos helping people to sell, these all link back to our websites where we have an online credit card acceptance. We also take PayPal because 75% of our customers prefer this. Plus an email contact with which they can ask any question they like.
We’ve spent a Day in the Life of our customers. Have you done this recently?
If I were selling mortgages, I would do everything listed above but would allow them the facility to speak with me online using video and conduct the whole mortgage meeting process via online methods, because that’s how customers now want to buy. But you may think differently, it all depends on the day in the life of your customer.
And the Beatles number was ranked the 28th greatest song of all time by Rolling Stone magazine.
