Best Practices: Marketing by Being Neutral

Lets face it, we all hate a sales pitch. A direct full on, obvious, loud, insensitive sales pitch. It brings to my mind, images of door-to-door sales people selling encyclopedias. Its the worst possible method to sell encylcopedias, because, the person selling it does such bad job of it and it also makes me feel guilty when I slam the door because, really, who buys encyclopedias on opening one's door?

Encyclopedias are not a commodity, so inorder to sell it, the person buying it has to be convinced that she really needs it. Nobody these days bothers with the convincing, they just straight away move to selling their product and that's what makes a sales pitch such a turn off.

BUY MY CREDIT CARD,BUY MY CREDIT CARD!!!



No, the first thing that any sales person must do, is to convince the buyer that she needs another credit card because of whatever reasons. Once a strong need has been created, the sales person can then swoop in and sell her the credit card.


The first step of creating a need in the buyer's mind is very important because it builds trust with the buyer. To the buyer you're like a third party neutral observer giving advise and most importantly there is no agenda in what you're saying. For, in a full on sales pitch, you'd hardly believe a word of what is being said because you are aware all along that the sales person has an agenda and that he's out to get you.


That's why behaving like you have no agenda can sometimes be the best marketing tool. Take for example, this page I landed on: http://www.lsfnetwork.com/importance-web-analytics.html
when I was doing some research on a web analytics article.


LSFnetwork is a internet based marketing agency. they do everything from media planning to search engine marketing and more. But look how they "sell" their products and services on this webpage for search engine marketing: http://www.lsfnetwork.com/sem-services.html






They first give solid statistics. Make a claim about web users and then provide third party articles on the right side bar. These articles give tips, elucidate web concepts and even provide strategies on marketing. Anybody who has a business would be interested in learning about all these. In all these articles, the LSFnetwork pitch comes only in the last paragraph but the thing is, the moment I come to the last paragraph, I'm convinced that LSFnetwork knows what its talking about, knows the internet better than I do and so I'm convinced that they can do the job.


All they did was appear neutral by putting in relevant resources. These resources project them as a company that understands the medium thoroughly and ergo built trust with me. Then when they sell me their stuff, I'm more receptive to their pitch and it does not sound like hollow sales talk.



I think its a brilliant strategy!



I think this strategy is pertinent to tech companies especially because tech products need the most amount of convincing. Technology is a difficult place to market products in, especially when its changing so rapidly. Customers will buy only when they are convinced about the product and no amount of sales talk is going to do it.



And customers will be convinced only when they see a product that meets their need and they see a product coming from a company that understand that technology thoroughly and seems confident about it. That's why "Thought Leadership" image is so important to tech companies these days. Customers will buy only from a company that truly seems like its an expert in a domain because it gives confidence to the customer. That's why I think its very important to be neutral sometimes in marketing technology products