UnSelling is what happens when you understand the humanity of your market, produce a quality product and create experiences that lead to trusted referrals. UnSelling means stepping back from the funnel and focusing on everything else but the sale.
I once sat in a VIP lounge at a conference where business owners had paid extra for a few-hour closed session with me and my friend, John Morgan. During the session, one person raised a hand and said, “If someone isn’t ready to buy from me in the next six weeks, I don’t want to talk to him. I’m not wasting my time on anyone not ready to buy.”
Obviously, this ray of sunshine isn’t right for social media. With so much competition and information available to our customers, who would want to work with someone who clearly just sees them as a number?
Your customers also don’t stop being important once they’ve bought from you. Once they move through your sales funnel - if you’ve been able to get them in and keep them happy during the process - they now reenter the sales cloud and join the other voices. Was their experience as a customer good enough to share? Did they leave unhappy? Making the sale isn’t enough; we need to be creating shareable experiences for our customers through great products and service.
Once through the funnel, customers return to the cloud — this is almost always ignored. Current customers are treated as an entirely different pool than prospective ones. We bend over backward for new prospects, while leaving current customers to fend for themselves. Focusing outside the funnel is what UnSelling is all about.
One of the arguments against valuing social media referrals is that there isn’t always an easily measurable line between referral and purchase. But has there ever been? In the past, when I walked into a store to make a purchase, the salesperson never wondered whether it was my sister’s recommendation, a billboard or random chance that brought me in. Now that we can measure where a click comes from, we think that this line should be direct. Studies show that consumers will consult almost a dozen sources on average before making a purchase decision. The click that leads to the sale is only a small piece of the sales puzzle.
We have so much information before us now that we may check 20 resources before making a click through to a purchase decision. That doesn’t mean that these influences aren’t important or that they don’t lead to decisions and purchases.
It may have taken three ads, two sightings on a friend’s blog and a lot of nagging from my mom to get me to buy a new pair of jeans, but each one led to the sale with equal importance.
In today’s world, we need to drop our funnel vision ways and focus on UnSelling if we’re going to remain top of mind for our market. Buy or goodbye is ineffective in a world where purchase decisions are made long before you even get a chance to pitch.
Excerpted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from UnSelling: The New Customer Experience by Scott Stratten and Alison Kramer. Copyright © 2014 by Scott Stratten. All rights reserved. This book is available at all bookstores and online booksellers.
