How Customers Buy

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"Overcome their objections."

"Establish a relationship."

"Target market."

"Convert them."

"Personas."

"Push."

"Pull."

These phrases are the lingua franca of marketing and sales. And they are rude! Offensive to the very people they are referring to - the very buyers who are considered "the target market." And they are a symbol of all that is wrong with marketing and selling right now.

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Are buyers really liars?

Actually, the real question is: Do sellers do things that force buyers to lie?

The answer, of course, is YES.

To see why the answer is yes, let's look at a typical interaction between a salesperson and a customer in a selling situation.

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Buyer Personas have become standard website design tools. Good. Creating them helps everyone in the company understand better who buyers are and what they want. Of course, the personas must be created by interviewing real customers, or they will not be accurate - which will defeat the whole purpose. Guessing or assuming is a big mistake.

On top of that, Buyer Personas can also get in the way. I don't need some seller to tell me who I am or force me to "select myself" before I can access their product or service. If I walked into a store and was forced to answer questions about the "category" I fall into before I was allowed to shop, I would turn on a heel and leave.

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Well, Dear Readers, my new book, Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy, is finally out there - in print and in ebook form, available everywhere (including Amazon, of course).

I wanted you to know what the book contains and what it can do for you.

Not like all the others

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You will only make a sale if you answer your customer's real questions. 

If you know what is important to your customers, you know the questions they ask as they buy. You will make those answers easy to find, as the customer is making her buying decision.