Selling Internet marketing services, or more specifically search engine optimization, to a local business becomes rather challenging if you don’t fully understand the system and procedures involved in order to accomplish this.
Businesses buy for very different reasons than a consumer would. Consumers typically purchase from emotion, however a business rarely purchases out of emotion and almost always purchases to solve a problem.
For example, a business may be losing market share, not achieving their sales targets, or simply will want to grow. The problem at hand is the same with all three scenarios…lack of sales. Therefore the solution to that problem is more sales. It seems simple. A business might need to be more efficient with a particular process so they can purchase some technology. But lack of sales is a problem not solved by purchasing new equipment.
Therefore local businesses that are prospective buyers of Internet marketing related services, or search engine optimization, have a small handful of potential problems that they need solved.
Selling SEO requires a solution selling approach. If you would like to learn more about solution selling, I recommend reading Neil Rackham’s SPIN selling book.
In the following we’re going to take a look at some of the steps that are required in order to find prospects and sell prospects the service of search engine optimization.
There are six steps identified in the sales process for selling search engine optimization.
The goal of each stage is to get to the next one. You’ll find that you can rarely skip stages for any prospect, however in some cases you can bypass either the education or the analysis stage and jump to the proposal stage. This will make more sense later.
Select Target Markets
Regardless of the size of your city or town, there are many local businesses that are willing to pay money for your services. Over the last 12 months a large number of small business owners are starting to realize that they need to spend some money on advertising their business on the Internet.
When I say qualified prospect, I’m talking about that local business that is willing to pay you over $1000 a month for services and a business that you’re able to deliver a service with a positive return on their investment. But who are these buyers and how do you get your message to them?
Here are some examples we put together for you.
