CHAPTER 2

Engaging Customers Early in Their Digital Buying Process

The opening of my first book, Think Like Your Customer (McGraw Hill 2005), featured a short story that has since been told in over 1,000 sales training workshops and keynote speeches all over the world. Whether you’ve heard it before or not, the main takeaway from this story is worth remembering and living by. If we are to thrive in this rapidly changing digital marketplace, this truth applies now more than ever.

As a kid I was blessed to spend a lot of time going fishing with my dad. Many of those trips were mini-adventures filled with unexpected challenges and a variety of hilarious mishaps that I will never forget. I learned many life lessons through those years. But the most valuable was a certain little gem that my dad taught me when I would get frustrated watching him catch fish in almost any situation while I could seldom catch a thing. His best advice on fishing was simply this: “If you want to catch a fish, you have to think like a fish!”

At first, I couldn’t understand how what I thought would have any impact whatsoever on my ability to catch a fish. My only question was, “What do I need to do to get a bass to bite this lure or a trout to take this fly?”

Over time I started to understand what my dad was really trying to teach me. What he meant was this: “If you want to catch a fish, you have to think about what fish think about.” Once I grasped that, everything changed! As I internalized that mindset, I learned to think about things like water levels, water clarity, water temperature, vegetation, food sources, feeding cycles, and a host of other factors. Carefully evaluating those variables is what enables an experienced fisherman to locate fish, assess the factors that are influencing their thinking and behavior, and ultimately entice them to bite—at least sometimes.

Eventually, I began to realize that my own thinking was often the primary determining factor in my success or failure in pretty much everything in life, not just fishing! This “think like a fish” approach has been the hallmark of my business career and represents the most important truth anyone could ever learn about sales, marketing, or entrepreneurship.

Put simply . . .

If you want to better attract, serve, and retain customers, you have to learn to think about what customers think about. Commit to studying and internalizing the psychology of how and why customers buy.

Asking how to catch a fish is the wrong question. What we need to know is what would cause a fish to bite or not bite in the first place. Likewise, asking how to make a sale is the wrong question. What we really need to understand is what would cause a customer to buy and how has the advent of so many new technologies changed the manner in which they do so.

How Customers Think When They Buy

For many years I have a used a diagram in my workshops I call the Customer Results Model as shown in Figure 2.1. It’s a visual illustration that helps illuminate how customers think as they make buying decisions. This idea has become the foundation for nearly all of the many training programs that I’ve developed over the years. It’s simple, which is what makes it so useful. But it has the potential to dramatically change the way we think, the way we communicate with clients, and the way we sell, especially in today’s digital-first marketplace.

The way I define it, a buying process begins when a customer recognizes some dissatisfaction with their current state. This is when they realize they have some sort of need, pain, problem, or challenge that is significant enough to do something about. I call this moment of recognition Point A as shown in Figure 2.1. Until a customer arrives at this place, they probably won’t buy anything. And they shouldn’t! But if the need or the pain they recognize and the consequences of remaining at Point A are significant enough, a potential sales opportunity is born.

Figure 2.1  Customer Results Model

If we think we can provide some kind of a product or service solution that would help the prospective customer, our goal as a seller becomes moving them from Point A to a place we will call Point B, where some sort of transaction takes place. We provide a solution in exchange for money. A sale is made!

At Point B, we could easily conclude that we are done! We book the order, earn some commission, and move on to the next opportunity. But for the customer, Point B is just the beginning. Now they have to go out and use whatever we sold them with the hope of arriving at what we’ll call Point C, or their desired future state.

One of the most challenging lessons in sales and marketing is recognizing that . . .

Nobody really wants to buy whatever solution you sell at Point B. What they want is to use what you sell to get the outcomes and results they want to achieve at Point C.

For example, pharmaceutical companies don’t want laboratory instruments. What they want is the ability to more quickly identify and develop compounds to be used in new drugs to improve people’s health and save lives. Likewise, your customers don’t want unified communication systems. What they want is a fully connected workforce that is productive enough to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction—which ensures customer retention—while working from any home or office in the world.

Most of what is sold in this world is not an end unto itself; more often it’s a means to an end. Our customers buy some sort of product or services solution to obtain their desired outcome. While we might sell a solution, what our customer actually buys is a result! This means that we have to move beyond just selling solutions. We have to learn how to sell outcomes and results!

Aligning with How Customers Buy

Now, chronologically—and of course alphabetically—the three letters used in this diagram appear A, B, and then C. But if we look more closely at the way customers think when they buy, we see that their thinking process is more often A, then C, and then back to B.

Once your customers recognize their dissatisfaction at A, they usually start imagining and visualizing what life might be like if they could get to C. Assuming that desired future state is compelling enough, they’ll probably start thinking about how to get there. This might include making an investment at B in some vehicle that would get them from where they are to where they want to go, as shown in Figure 2.2.

Figure 2.2  Customer Results Model Applied

For many years, I’ve taught this model as a highly effective format for real-time selling—where you can engage your client in a live conversation. You can start by asking questions to prompt the customer to talk about their current state problem, pain, need, issue, or some situation they are dissatisfied with. Then, you can help them assess the consequences of their current state (A). Help them determine what that situation is costing them using the units of measure that matter most to them, such as dollars spent, hours wasted, customers lost, and so on.

Once the client has acknowledged their problem or dissatisfaction, you can then lead the conversation to explore their desired future state. As you do this, make sure to quantify the value of the results they want to achieve using units of measure related to their desired outcomes, such as increasing gross revenue, accelerating the time to full productivity for new hires, improving customer renewal rates, and so forth. The more you can crystallize their C, and the more you can define the measurable return, the better you can craft an ideal solution and justify whatever investment is required at B.

This exact same model, which is incredibly effective for real-time selling, is the perfect tool to guide our efforts for creating the content and assets we can use for asynchronous digital selling as well. It can be used by salespeople in their outbound emails as well as by marketeers to create website copy, social media content, marketing collateral, and so on.

So much of what is published in social media and blog posts or made into videos for company websites is all about B. It’s all about our company and what we offer. But it doesn’t have to be that way! We can use social posts, published articles, YouTube videos, or really any medium to pose questions and engage readers and viewers in e-conversations about their current state (A) and desired future state (C). Over these next few chapters, we’re going to learn how to use this more outcome-oriented approach as we help our clients work through the decisions involved in their buying process even when selling asynchronously.

The Big Shift and the Quantum Leap

This Customer Results Model is designed to cause two specific epiphanies in the evolution of every salesperson, marketer, or business owner who sees it. The first of these I call the big shift.

The big shift occurs when we recognize our responsibility is not just presenting and promoting our product but helping our customers make smart decisions as they work through the steps of their buying process.

This is huge! Even for those of us who’ve been around long enough to know better, it’s just too easy to get in a hurry, or maybe get a little lazy, and forget to diagnose our customer’s problem before we prescribe a solution. We focus on “making the sale” and lose sight of the steps the customer has to take and the various decisions they have to make before they can buy. What we need to do is identify the questions in the customer’s mind and provide the answers to those questions so they can make good decisions every step of the way.

Once we’ve made the big shift and start to focus less on selling and more on facilitating our customer’s buying process, the next major breakthrough for most of us is what I refer to as the quantum leap . . .

The quantum leap happens when we embrace the fact that today we often need to empower customers to work through buying decisions entirely asynchronously.

Ouch! Many of us don’t want to hear that. That’s why I call this the quantum leap. We don’t want to give up the perceived control we have in real-time, synchronous selling. But that control we think we have is a false perception. We lost that control the instant one of our competitors put up a series of YouTube videos to answer customer questions that used to require a face-to-face meeting. Today’s buyers are drawing conclusions and making decisions without us because they can!

Your would-be customers may take the time to peruse your website. They may look at your LinkedIn profile. They might even watch a couple of your videos on YouTube. But if they aren’t impressed by what they see, they probably won’t call you or respond to your calls and emails to them. Therefore, the digital assets you post or send have to be created to do at least some of the selling for you. They at least have to be good enough to sell the right to have a conversation!

Is it possible to empower your customers to make better decisions at each stage of their buying process using only the written word, graphics, audio, or video? Absolutely! The question is whether we will or not. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter whether we want to do it. If we are to remain competitive, we basically don’t have a choice! If we don’t do it, somebody else will!

How Buyer/Seller Engagement Has Changed

Prior to the arrival of the World Wide Web, most buyers had no choice but to meet or get on the phone with a seller if they needed help solving a problem. Information about the products and services buyers had an interest in came in the form of a printed catalog, a brochure, or a conversation with a person who could provide those products and services.

Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, nearly every company tried to push as much information about themselves and their offerings to the web as possible. Through the years resources like online forums, blogs, YouTube, and a variety of social media platforms made it possible for buyers to learn about companies or even individual sellers from their colleagues, industry experts, and independent researchers. During the most recent decade, information and opinions from third-party sources have become absolutely ubiquitous.

Today, consumers and even B2B buyers often gather more information about the products and services available to them from these third-party sources—Google reviews, Yelp, and research firms like Gartner—than from the companies that sell the products themselves. It’s quite sobering when you realize that today’s customer often puts more credence in what people on the internet say about you than what you say about yourself!

All of this has led us to a place where the first conversation buyers have with an actual salesperson often comes much later in their buying process than ever before. Buyers frequently recognize their dissatisfaction with their current state and begin their buying journey based on what they read, watch, and listen to online. The typical point of buyer and seller engagement has changed drastically over the years, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3  First Point of Customer Engagement

Today, your customers can simply go to their favorite search engine and start typing in the problem they are having or the business outcome they want to achieve. They can go on YouTube and see other people just like themselves talking about how they solved the same problem or achieved the same desired outcome. Maybe they will join an online forum of their peers, such as a LinkedIn group or a public Slack (www.slack.com) channel, to ask how other people have addressed the issues they face. The point is they no longer need you to provide the information required to make buying decisions. Oftentimes, they decide what they need and want first, and then they call you and three other providers to see who has the best price.

A number of years ago, Brent Adamson, who was the principal executive advisor at CEB at the time, released the findings of a widely referenced study that showed that, on average, a B2B buyer was 57 percent of the way through their buying process before they personally engaged a salesperson.¹ More recent studies state that the point of engagement is now 60 percent or even 70 percent of the way through the process.

These statistics have been misinterpreted by many to mean that we shouldn’t bother trying to engage clients earlier in their process. The thinking is: They don’t want to hear from us. Let’s just focus our selling efforts on that last 30 or 40 percent of the process after the prospect calls us or fills out a request-for-information form on our website. I totally disagree!

The best time to engage your target clients is before a project even exists! You want to be the one who helps your client recognize their dissatisfaction and paints the picture of the ideal Point C you can help them achieve. You want to help shape perception and earn preference long before a need becomes a deal. Otherwise, you relegate yourself to being just another “bidder.”

Let’s say you are an outside account executive with a deck of 25 target accounts. If the first time you have any personal contact with the key buyers and influencers in one of these accounts is when they are 60+ percent of the way through a buying process, you’ve probably already lost the deal. Those of us who are hunters can’t afford to wait around for our target prospects to contact us! In that kind of sales environment, a proactive outbound approach is imperative! But your initial outreach doesn’t necessarily have to be a cold telephone call to request a one-hour meeting. Today, we usually have to get a little more creative than that.

Empowering Customers Throughout Their Buying Process

In his book The Ultimate Sales Machine (Portfolio 2007), author Chet Holmes offered a diagram that is quite eye-opening for just about everyone involved in sales and marketing. Chet says he drew these conclusions about the composition of a typical market based on personal observations and regularly polling the audiences that he spoke to.

Even though the exact percentages he used are not scientifically validated, the truth that is revealed—and that you and I can apply—is just as powerful as if it were based on an extensive study. It’s so good that dozens of other authors have since copyrighted it, published it, and called it their own. Here’s my version based on Chet’s idea, shown in Figure 2.4.

Figure 2.4  Pyramid of Awareness

Only about 3 percent of the people or companies in a typical market are actually ready to buy something at any given time.² These “Top 3 percent” are in buying mode and are the ones who typically respond to advertising and outbound sales prospecting. If we happen to put something in front of them at the right time, they are likely to visit our website and submit a request for information. Maybe they’ll even respond to an outbound email marketing campaign or telephone call.

Beyond those who are currently in buying mode, there is another 7 percent or so who are “open to explore.” In years past, these “Open 7 percent” would often agree to a telephone conversation if we proposed one. But because of how digital buying has evolved, these “lookers” now often prefer to attend the occasional webinar (with their camera off, of course) or poke around various websites and YouTube channels at their leisure. Maybe they’ll even exchange their phone number for the right to download an article or a white paper once in a while. But unless that white paper is written specifically to resonate with their dissatisfaction with A or clearly lays out the payback available at C, they frequently won’t even pick up the phone when we call to follow up.

In terms of practical application, companies or individuals who are willing to do the work involved in outbound prospecting can make a first pass on a target list of prospects with email or telephone campaigns. That is probably the quickest way to reveal those in the Top 3 percent and the Open 7 percent who are willing to have a sales conversation. Some are!

Here’s my belief . . .

It’s not as if outbound selling motions don’t work anymore. It’s the nature of our approach and the substance of what we attempt to communicate with our outbound efforts that needs an extreme makeover!

We’ll talk about this much more extensively in Chapter 7.

The “Next 30 percent” have some awareness of their own need for help at some point. They might already know we exist and may even be starting to sense a bit of dissatisfaction with their current state, but not enough to really explore. Then comes the “Middle 30 percent” that have no awareness of their own need for help yet. And last, we have the “Bottom 30 percent” who are not only unaware they might ever need what we have to provide, but are opposed to even thinking about it. Perhaps they just made an investment in something similar to what we offer and can’t imagine ever being in a different situation. Maybe their brother-in-law works for our competitor. Or maybe they’re just grumpy! Who knows?

I remember the days when the Top 3 percent were actively ringing our telephone to get answers to their questions. The Open 7 percent were happy to take our phone calls or even book a meeting if we happened to be in their area. Even the Next 30 percent would occasionally attend an introductory seminar if it was close enough to their office and we had free Starbucks coffee and Cinnabon rolls. Obviously, things are a little different now.

The conventional “numbers game” approach to selling has always been about finding and selling to the Top 3 percent who are buying now and spending almost all of our time and effort there. That strategy was effective back when buyers had a greater need for a seller’s help in terms of education and information. Now, they have the ability to locate, research, and draw conclusions about us and other potential suppliers long before we ever know they exist!

Therefore . . .

Focusing on finding and selling only to the Top 3 percent is a flawed strategy today because by the time they arrive there, customers already have a strong preference for the company that helped them get there digitally. If it’s not us, our odds of winning drop off dramatically.

The real opportunity lies in engaging with your prospective customers regardless of what level they occupy and empowering them to move up through the pyramid of awareness. You’ll want to literally lead them all the way into the Top 3 percent when the time is right. The upward arrow in Figure 2.4 represents the building of e-relationships that empower your prospects to become potential customers. Once empowered, future customers start to feel as if they know you and already have a strong preference for doing business with you before they ever get to the top of the pyramid. Now let’s talk about how to do that.

Engaging in the Early Stages with Insight

For a visual illustration of what customer empowerment looks like in action, let’s turn that pyramid on its side and overlay it onto my Customer Results Model. This shows how awareness typically progresses as the customer moves from Point A to Point B. See Figure 2.5.

Figure 2.5  Engaging Earlier in Your Customer’s Buying Process

Traditional advertising and cold-call prospecting are most effective with the Top 3 percent who are buying now and the Open 7 percent who might consider looking.

This means . . .

Roughly 90 percent of our market is unlikely to respond to advertising and cold-calling, so we have to reach back into the earlier stages of their buying process and engage them in a different way.

People who aren’t in the upper 10 percent (the Top 3 percent plus Open 7 percent) that are currently buying or looking typically won’t respond to an advertisement that’s all about us and the products and services we have for sale (our B). If we want to connect with them, we have to offer them something they find value in reading or watching that talks about their A or their C. We need to provide digital assets that are relevant and helpful to them, wherever they are in the pyramid. For those in the lower 90 percent, we can’t just throw them another ad. We need to offer insight.

Insight is a piece of information that brings about a new way of looking at something. It causes introspection. It enables the reader to make a new deduction or arrive at a different conclusion. Insight manifests itself as a sudden understanding of how to solve a difficult problem or obtain a desired result. Insight can produce an epiphany or a eureka moment. I like to call these aha moments or even uh-oh moments. The intent is to cause the reader to think, “Wow, I never thought about it like that before.”

The basic strategy for much of advertising is to make it easy for people to find us when they are ready to buy. Digital selling using insight, on the other hand, helps people get ready to buy by providing knowledge, guidance, and information that changes their perception of:

•   Their dissatisfaction of the current state (A)

•   The consequences of remaining at A

•   The possibilities available at their desired future state (C)

•   The payback or return when they reach C

•   Why they should take action now

•   Why we are the ideal partner to help them

Those who master digital selling will use insight to help customers draw favorable conclusions and make smart decisions at every point in their buying process.

When delivered well, insight provides context for interpreting new data, real-world examples, suggestions for practical application, and proven best practices. Insight changes hearts and minds. Insight literally generates demand! Empowering customers with insight that moves them upward through the pyramid toward that Top 3 percent is the way we create a preference for doing business with us once they get there.

People tend to rely more heavily on information they gather early in their discovery process. Psychologists call this anchor bias. The person or company that brings new insight to the buying process—and creates those aha moments when buyers are in their exploratory stages—usually becomes the point of reference by which all other sources of information are compared later on.

When selling in real time, of course, insight can be shared verbally. In my opinion, this is still the ideal approach if and when you can get an appointment with your buyer for a synchronous conversation. In an early-stage live discussion, my goal is always to spark conversation and get my customer talking by asking them diagnostic questions they wouldn’t think to ask themselves. If you can get your customer to rub their chin and say, “Hmmm. That’s a good question,” then you know you’ve got them thinking differently than they were before you came along.

Asking questions to seek understanding about their current state and desired future state not only helps us better select and position the right solution, but it literally causes your customers to see things differently and arrive at new conclusions. You also earn trust and rapport along the way. Hearing their responses in real time and then asking good follow-up questions that lead them to your way of thinking is truly selling at its finest. Honestly, I wish all selling could be synchronous selling! That’s just not always possible today.

When it comes to digital selling in an asynchronous fashion, insight can be shared in a wide variety of formats:

•   Website or landing page copy

•   Videos on websites, social platforms, or YouTube

•   Downloadable assets like white papers, studies, or a “free guide” of some sort

•   Social media posts, either organic or paid

•   Comments you leave on other people’s posts

•   Articles, books, and ebooks

•   Blog posts, either on your own blog or as a guest on someone else’s

•   Podcasts, either your own or as a guest on someone else’s

•   Online text-based, live-audio, and live-video discussion forums

•   Digital advertorials and other paid or bartered digital content placement

To illustrate how to use insight in one or more of these ways, let’s look at a few different examples of how you could share some of your knowledge and experience in the form of an article entitled “5 Ways Manufacturers Are Hemorrhaging Money by Using Obsolete ________________ Systems.” Fill in the blank or reword this sample title to make it relevant to your market and the solutions you provide.

Posting a piece like this as a blog or an article on LinkedIn creates a powerful digital asset for “inbound” selling that could appeal to just about everyone. When designed well, it can help us earn credibility and trust with those in the upper 10 percent as well as trigger those in the lower 90 percent to want to explore things further and move upward through the pyramid stack.

Once you have an asset like this, you can also send this article as an attachment or a hyperlink in an email or LinkedIn message as part of your outbound strategy. You could even shoot a video delivering the same insight and leverage that on YouTube and then send the link within an email. In the coming chapters, I’ll offer a wide variety of ways to deliver your insight both inbound and outbound. But the secret is not in the delivery mechanism. The key is the intent and the substance of your article or video content itself!

Please note: This particular example is not an article on the technical details of your new product or all the whiz-bang functions of your latest technology. It’s also not a side-by-side “shoot-out” comparison showing how you annihilate your top three major competitors. That kind of information has its place, especially for the Top 3 percent and the Open 7 percent. We need those digital assets, too! But the lower 90 percent of the market probably won’t respond to that yet. Choosing who to buy from just isn’t relevant if your buyer hasn’t yet concluded they need to explore buying anything in the first place.

Whenever possible, focus on creating separate marketing and outreach campaigns for those people and companies you believe are currently in the upper 10 percent versus the lower 90 percent. Today, there are tools that can help you determine which ones are which using “intent data,” which we’ll talk about later. Initiate different kinds of e-conversations for each group. Do specific outcome-oriented marketing about solutions that appeal to the upper 10 percent, and deliver well-crafted insight that influences the perceptions of the lower 90 percent.

Frankly, the 90 percent who aren’t buying or looking right now don’t want to be sold to. They simply won’t tolerate being inundated by a never-ending barrage of ads and pitches. They will tune you out, block your phone number, mark you as spam, or promptly unfollow. But even the Bottom 30 percent, who are often totally annoyed by ads and prospecting outreach, see value in insight if it’s of benefit to them in their current situation.

What if you wrote an article or shot a video called, “How to Maximize Your Return on Investment in _______________?” (Fill in the blank with whatever you sell.) Even the companies who just bought your competitor’s product might be interested in reading that! When they do, you earn credibility and are seen as an expert in return on investment, not just a guy schlepping another product. They might call you in as a consultant to help them with a broader initiative or to bail them out if their implementation goes awry. Or maybe they’ll reach out to you when they move on to a different company nine months later.

If you serve brick-and-mortar retailers, for example, how about writing a series of LinkedIn posts to be released every Tuesday morning called “6 Colossal Mistakes Today’s Retailers Cannot Afford to Make”? Each of the six installments should be written to cause the reader to experience one of those aha moments and walk away thinking or doing something different than they were before they read it. Always share your insight with the intent of altering your reader’s beliefs and perceptions.

YouTube is probably the best and most underutilized platform for sharing insights with your market in an informative and engaging way while building familiarity and rapport at the same time. Sharing one or more new nuggets of insight on YouTube every week has been the starting point for thousands of successful “YouTubers” as well as companies who regularly “feed” their subscribers and empower them to become paying customers when the time is right.

Make sure to let the reader or the viewer know to tune in the following week for the next episode. Good old-fashioned curiosity could cause some of them to reach out to you right now because they don’t want to wait six weeks to hear all of your helpful suggestions.

Here are a few more examples of possible titles for digital assets that could completely change the e-conversations you are having with your future customers. As you read, think about which words you would change to make these relevant to your industry. Maybe even write a few headlines or titles of your own:

5 Risks You Run by Not Moving Your Mission-Critical Applications to the Cloud

6 Incredibly Powerful Ways to Improve Customer Service and Minimize Churn

Assessing the Consequences and Costs of Not Embracing 5G Wireless

3 Major Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing a New Payroll System

7 Little-Known Ways to Quantify Your Return on Investment in Sales Training

4 Reasons Why Do-It-Yourself Property Management Could Cost You Big Money

It’s crucial here not to allow an article like this to become just a poorly disguised product pitch or stealth brochure. If you’re going to add insight, make it interesting, objective, and focused on solving problems and achieving results. If the only advice or recommendation you offer is “you need to buy my product,” you’ll squander all the credibility and authority you worked so hard to establish.

I bet you’ve noticed that almost all of these sample topics begin with a number and promise multiple fresh insights right in the title. Most people cannot resist the promise of four, or five, or six new ideas that relate to some business outcome that matters to them. They figure, “Surely one of these suggestions has to be applicable in my situation.” Professional headline writers almost always use the numeral at the beginning instead of spelling out the number.

You can give away multiple select tips in one downloadable document or break them into pieces. Sharing one tip at a time daily or weekly on social media can be a very effective way to keep your audience coming back for more. Or you can offer people a collection of insights in exchange for their contact information or for registering for your upcoming free online masterclass. I’ll have a ton of additional ideas for how to use these kinds of assets coming your way throughout the rest of the book.

Sharing Your Knowledge and Insight with Your Market

Some who are reading this are thinking, “Wait a minute. I’m not going to give away all my trade secrets and all my advice on the internet for free! That’s what people pay me for! One of my competitors might read it, and I would be out of business!” If that’s you, you wouldn’t be the first person to think that. That fear is surely one of the main reasons so many people never really step into using insights to engage with prospective customers early in their buying process.

But the most effective marketeers today, the voices that others want to follow, the “influencers” in this world that shape market perception, are influential because they freely share their throughts and opinions with everyone. When they do, the people who follow them and value their knowledge and expertise are more than happy to buy whatever they offer or recommend.

The best example I can give you of the power of selling through sharing insights is the very book you are holding in your hands. As you can see, I am giving away everything I have learned through a lifetime in the selling profession basically free of charge. If you knew how few pennies an author earns on each book sold, you’d agree that this is not exactly a high-profit endeavor. But here’s what I can tell you.

When Think Like Your Customer was released in the fall of 2004, my business and my career went from “really good” to “beyond my wildest dreams.” When that book appeared on the shelves of bookstores around the world, was displayed right next to the cash register at hundreds of FedEx Kinko’s stores (now FedEx Office), and became a category bestseller on Amazon.com, my whole life changed!

Now let’s be clear: I’m not Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. But within a few months, I had senior executives at companies all over the world calling my phone number and asking me to train their global sales teams and speak at their annual sales conferences. Despite the fact that I put every good idea I had into that book, somehow people still wanted more. I had just shared everything I knew in exchange for less than a buck-a-copy in royalties. But the business engagements that flowed from that exposure have paid the bills quite nicely for nearly 20 years.

If you’re not quite ready to publish your first book yet, start with one well-crafted post on LinkedIn! Maybe cowrite an article with one of your product engineers that speaks to how your solutions can be used to solve a particular business problem that many of your customers face.

Ask your best client to provide a testimonial and turn it into a short story that you can publish. Maybe even record a video of a client talking about how you’ve helped them improve their business performance and post that video on YouTube. Take what you know and share it with the world free of charge! I assure you that the people who like what they see are going to want to hear more.

Take the case of a gentleman I know named Allyn Hane, as an example. He launched a YouTube channel called “The Lawn Care Nut” about 10 years ago and started posting a weekly video with tips about his passion for cultivating a fabulous lawn. When he realized that his little audience had become a viable marketplace, he decided to launch his own line of lawn care products that he could recommend on his show.

At the time of this writing, Allyn has more than 493,000 subscribers, which is about double what he had just 18 months ago. Lots of people sell lawn care products. Not all that many have hundreds of thousands of people watching a new video episode every week on exactly how they can use those products to achieve the amazing lawn they’ve always dreamed of.

Are you ready to take me up on the challenge? Learn to engage your prospective customers at every stage of their buying process by delivering every morsel of knowledge and insight you can produce through a variety of communication channels. Over the next several chapters I’m going to show you how to become a trusted resource for your prospective customers, not just another person “selling” something.

Putting These Ideas into Practice