How to Educate Your Potential Customers

Talking with several of my customers, I’ve noticed a trend. Many don’t know where to start when growing their sales pipeline. To fix this pain point, I’ve created the, Grow Your Sales Pipeline Series, which will help the entrepreneur, marketing and sales director (or associate) who is looking for different ways to fill up their sales pipeline.

How to target customers
How to communicate with potential customers
Educating potential customers
How to land potential customers

In part 3 of the series, I will talk about how to Educate those potential and current customers you have. Instead of pushing one to buy your product immediately, create ways to educate these visitors so you become the authority, trustworthy and credible.

Take a look around you, whether it is the computer or cell phone screen you are reading this on, to the billboard on your drive into work. Advertising is everywhere. Take an inventory of everything around you. You are being sold thousands of times a day. How can that really be the best way to convert someone into a paying customer. It’s a 1/5,000 chance! Instead, be different, think out of the box and educate rather than sell.

When educating potential customers, this is where we really dive down the funnel and figure out who really is interested. Before I talked about ways to bring together a critical mass of people (events, etc) and leverage relationships. Now, we are getting into the nitty-gritty and discovering who will likely become a client and who is engaged.

As with anything in business, you need to have a goal for everything you do. Like this series for an example, my goal is to educate you through a four-part tour to build your sales pipeline so you can make more money for your company.

Getting people to attend your event, meetup or webinar is one thing, actually educating them is another. For example, my friend Ryan asked me a few weeks ago where I get my hair cut. Ryan was looking for someone more local and I told him that I go to Jake’s Place, a Norfolk local business. Now, When I told Ryan that Jake’s Place was great and specifically, Heather, my hair stylists, I am giving my approval. Approval on anything goes a long way, but it must be verified. If Ryan gets his hair cut by Heather and it sucks, he’s not only going to likely not go back, but also lost credibility in me. I have to be selective about what information I give out if I don’t believe in it. If you are reading this Heather, don’t screw it up!

Same can be said for education, if people aren’t learning from you, they won’t come back. Since your end goal is likely to up-sell something, like a SAAS product, a paid workshop or consulting, you want to make sure that you do educate, while at the same time not giving away all of your special sauces for free. Instead, decide on a few topics that you can use as ‘deal flow’ and teach away. Think of the broadest amount of information that you can give away. For me, I tend to give away marketing tips, how to create an event and to build a community. Once I have established a critical mass of people for these topics, I then funnel them down into leads and encourage them to purchase my product once I have educated them through an email campaign, blog posts or entry-level events.

So, Zack, I’m not a teacher and I’m not really sure what I should or would teach and why would anyone ever listen to me?

Ever heard of the term, ‘fake it, till you make it‘. In my case, I had no idea what to do, not only with events but business and definitely not teaching it. So, I created a way for the type of people I wanted to work with to come together and basically acted as the moderator. I would do some quick google searches on business or ask those who attended what they wanted to learn, that way it would be very education instead of me thinking I knew what they wanted to learn. My goal was to create a group of past, present and future entrepreneurs to learn from each other through their experiences in business and in life.

To do this, you can’t be afraid of the unknowns, rather be excited about the challenge, not only in teaching yourself something new but the opportunity to bring in new business in ways you never thought possible.

How Can you educate potential and current customers?

1. Dummies Guide to <insert topic here>
2. Tour a project you just worked on
3. Guest Speakers

Remember, you are not selling anything at this point. Just bringing a collection of people together to educate them. You will bring them through the sales funnel in next weeks final part of the series, landing the client.

Dummies Guide.

When educating in the dummies guide style, start from the bottom and move forward. This series is using this model, where I take a broad topic and break it down into several smaller parts and each part is split by giving even more examples. Creating a series on a specific topic for your visitors. If you do not know what to write about, do a quick google search using keywords associated with your industry and see what others are talking about, you can also request a topic from current customers or peruse through LinkedIn groups and see what others are asking and talking about. Then collect all the data and either create written whitepapers about or host an event on the topic.

Touring a project

It worked great for our developer meetups. Every Friday, we would invite the developer community to our office for a lunch and learn session, which we would showcase a new tool, feature or problem we solved on a current project. We used these project tours to educate our potential new employees. Because we were teaching our industry new tools, this organically made us the authority in web development in Norfolk. Literally out of know where. We were an open book and shared the problems we were solving and how we went about each element. These meetups would average a dozen or so people from other agencies in town, we would also invite the companies we were working with to attend so they could learn the technical side of how we were making decisions.

Remember, it’s not all about selling, it’s the proving that you are the authority, that you are trustworthy and are King of the Mountain in your industry.

Guests.

So, you are still afraid to host an event or know what to do. Allow others to do the educating for you. All you have to do is be the moderator or give up the use of your platform. Example. Allow an SEO Expert to write a guest blog post on your site about ways to grow through organic SEO methods or host a panel discussion and invite three to four experts, local or national. The great thing about a panel discussion is you will be able to leverage 3-4 times more marketing alone from those who are speaking. Most likely they will promote the event because they will be speaking.

Tip. Don’t forget to link back your events on your website, thus when the event is being shared, your website is the one being shared.

To recap, we went over three ways to educate your customers; through event and blog teaching; creating a series around a topic that many are asking about, showcasing your work with others in your community and finally leveraging other industry experts to grow your brand.

Next week is the final week in ‘The Formula for Filling Your Sales Pipeline’ series, on turning your visitors into customers. Don’t miss it, sign up below.