Is needs-based selling the
foundation of inbound marketing?

In the past there were sales techniques where a company would talk about nothing more than the “Features” or their products. Then a few years later we started adding discussions on “Benefits”.

The problem here is this is a very “ME focused” mind set.

Over the past few years companies have been starting to figure out they needed to be more “Customer Focused”. Many threw around this new buzz word without much of an idea what it really meant to be customer centric.

The key, as we have been saying for years, is to ask the question – What’s in it for them?

Obviously meaning your customer. This question needs to be asked at ever step of the way when developing marketing for a customer.

This is where Needs-Based Selling comes in.

Needs-Based Selling is basically getting into the head of your customers and defining what their needs and wants are. Understanding their everyday problems is the key. Once you take the time to do this you then start to figure out what problems you solve for your customer. Then when it comes to marketing, you stop talking about features and benefits of your products/services and start discussing the problem and how to fix it.

If you are using this needs-based selling approach already, but not using it on your web site then you need to know about Inbound Marketing.

Basically inbound marketing take the needs-based sales approach to getting found, converting visitors to leads/customers and then retaining those customers via the resource you offer through your site.

Here is the idea of how this works. You take your customers problems and you start listing all the keywords they would use to search in order to find a solution. You then develop a blog on your site and start writing articles that are related to your prospects problems. Maybe this is in the form of case studies, but these articles are only focused on the users and solving their problems.

After several of these articles you will start to have a very valuable resource for perspective clients.

You will need to have each article on it’s own page and optimized for search engines and before you know it this resource will be found regularly on Google.

People will spread the word because your site is revolving around the users instead of your company.

The next thing you know you will have a solid community of users and prospects and more business than you can shake a stick at. Wouldn’t this be a nice change.

If you would like some other resources on similar topics, check out these other articles that might be helpful and all give more details on how to use Inbound Marketing.

• 5 Key Success Measurements
  for effective web sites.

• Self-publishing your way to
  million dollar business success.

• Inbound Marketing allows
  businesses to out think their competitors.

• Become an expert in your industry!
  Personal Branding can help.

All of these articles focus on offering solutions to problems and hopefully will help the readers find a better solution to selling their products or services with the focus being on helping the customer and not themselves.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this article and the ideas shared in these articles mentioned. Please leave us a comment if you found this article helpful.