Best of Ojeagbase

There are five critical steps to effective selling of anything, be it a product, a service or an idea. These five steps are what must be in place in any business, small or big, for it to prosper. If you can understand these five steps and patiently implement each one of them in your selling process, you’ll end up with a lot of money in the bank.

The five steps are: [1] Find those who would buy what you want to sell first [market]; [2] ensure you get the very best of what they want to buy [product or service]; [3] go back to the people and present what they want to buy to them in a way that it will please them [irresistible offer]; [4] present to them the most convenient way for them to buy it from you [call to action] and [5] keep repeating the five processes.

That’s it. If you can implement these five steps in your business, the Invisible Paymaster will love you and hand over cheques to you non-stop. In our previous lessons, we had covered steps one and two.

So let’s get started from Step 3. Even though you’ve located a market and you have the exact product or service that they want to buy, how you offer it to them is very critical to whether they eventually buy it from you or not.

Let’s say you have found a group of people who are thirsty because they couldn’t get treated water to drink. And you have succeeded in getting good supply of water, clean and safe to drink. But in presenting it to them, you dish the water in a bottle containing foreign bodies.

Now, although your target market is thirsty for water and you have the water, because the bottle the water is put in is not hygienic, it will affect how the target market receives your water.

That illustration should make it clear to you that knowing where your market is and having what they want to buy does not always translate to sales unless you get Step 3 right.

Here’s another thing about Step 3. As a marketer, you don’t have the power to lock up, practically or otherwise, the people who constitute the market that you discovered before you went in search of what they want to buy from you.

Let me explain. Take the market that is thirsty for water as an example. When you discovered their need, there was nothing you could do practically to prevent other marketers from discovering them. So, if they are accessible to other marketers, then you are most likely going to overcome stiff competition in order to be the one that satisfies the need of that market.

The way out of this dilemma is to understand what is known in marketing as irresistible offer. Irresistible Offer is an offer that your target market finds difficult to walk away from no matter how hard they try.

A well packaged irresistible offer will leave those who miss it for one reason or the other, regretting their bad luck for not being able to get their hands on it. Months, even years after they missed such an offer, they will still be feeling the pain.

How do you put such an offer together? What are the key elements that must be present for an irresistible offer to do the job of forcing prospects to become customers?

That’s where we shall continue this lesson in the next issue.