When I started in corporate face to face selling, forty years ago, I was taught the very first thing to establish, when meeting a prospective customer, was: Does the person in front of me have power of purchase? Fellow marketers will know this as qualifying the prospect.
If you're a webmaster, it's a question you should be asking too, because your internet survival could depend on it. Here's why.
In a corporate situation, it's necessary to quickly discover if the person you are speaking to can sign the order for what you are selling. If not, you should switch to selling them the proposition they will gain great kudos if their boss sees what you are offering. Oftentimes, you have to repeat your sales pitch several times, as you slowly move up the corporate food chain to the right person.
On the domestic front, this is far easier -- particularly in my previous career in real estate: it's the lady of the house who decides, period!
On-line it's also a piece of cake to know who has the power of purchase: anyone with a credit card!
So why have we all fallen for trying to please the Great God Google, when we know for certain search engine robots are non-customers?
All praise to Google, in particular, and all the other search engines in general. What they are trying to do is exactly what you should strive to do. It's what your government, your bank and the credit card corporations have already done so successfully. It is this: they have positioned themselves in your lives as gatekeepers.
Think about it. Your business -- indeed, your entire life -- cannot function without credit card and banking facilities. That's true gatekeeping, because you simply can't avoid doing business with them (for a fee, of course). Little wonder Warren Buffet bases his investment strategy firmly around . . . yup, you've guessed it: gatekeepers!
So let's look at Google's efforts to duplicate the stranglehold on everyday life achieved by the true gatekeepers. Certainly there is a whole army of search engine groupies out there, performing incredible feats of human sacrifice in both time and ingenuity -- like some modern day equivalent of an Inca tribesman -- to cause the Great God G to smile upon them and place them on that coveted first page of results. Let's see, the average competative keyword phrase might have 2,500,000 pages on Google and these heroes are trying to get into the top ten or twenty entries. There are better ways to squander your life.
Hardly surprising all it gets them is frustrated, tired, disillusioned by the fruitless struggle and -- even worse -- no sales.
If I hadn't been taught to sell -- and sell properly -- early on in my marketing career by a giant, Texas based, industrial chemical company, I might have spend many fruitless years pandering to the post boy, instead of the person with the real power - the official company buyer.
Your time is too valuable to waste worrying about the oily rag, when you really should be talking to the engineer -- or, as we call them in marketing: your valued clients. For it is these warm, living, breathing people who will provide you with that new Mercedes, the ocean front home on Maui and the wonderful internet lifestyle you crave -- not some robot at Mountain View, because that doesn't even qualify for a credit card.
And remember I said you too should strive to become a gatekeeper? You do this by using the time you are currently wasting, pandering to the fickle whims of the search engines, to improve your web site and make it a real resource, so your visitors and customers will choose to make your web site a vital part of their lives. That's true, humane gatekeeping!
Copyright 2006 Paul Hooper-Kelly and www.InternetMarketingMagician.com Paul Hooper-Kelly owns http://InternetMarketingMagician.com/ and uses his forty years marketing experience to help ordinary people achieve extraordinary on-line success, both through the wide range of resources, articles and other information on his website and as a popular "tell it like it is" seminar speaker.
Paul has just written an amazing new free course "Zero To Hero In Seven Days", so grab your copy now while it's still free at Free_Internet_Marketing_Training_Course | |
