Attraction Marketing and the Sales Gardener

April 14, 2009

Are you a sales gardener or a sales hunter? Can you be both?

Every organization should have a combination of great sales hunters and some good sales gardeners. In some ways, the sales gardeners are more like marketers vs salespeople. They work to master Inbound Lead Generation

However, while a marketer may concern themselves with brand awareness and advertising a sales gardener is going to plant seeds to get customers to come to them.

A successful sales gardener is someone that uses Inbound Lead Generation effectively to more easily close leads that come to them. They might use business blog software, twitter or postcards. There are actually many different kinds of marketing techniques that will help a sales person attract the right kind of leads to them.

What are the keys to attracting the customer?

Asking for Referrals
Free White Papers or reports
Search Engine Optimization
Encouraging ongoingWord of Mouth

In reality you need to do as many things as make sense for your target market to keep you top of mind and make yourself easier to be found. That is why you must be patient to be a sales gardener.

Search Engines are the new yellow pages, and they are where many people go to find product and services. Not only will they look up where to find something, but they will look up reviews, word of mouth, comments and search for discounts.

To be a good sales gardener, you need to plant seeds of information all over the web for what people will be looking for. If you are selling pizza, you should have a web page optimized for pizza coupons in your city. Simple, but most companies and most sales people overlook this critical part of Inbound Lead Generation.

Selling to target market looking for your product is much easier than selling to someone that is not interested. A sales hunter will go out and produce generate leads quickly. But chances are they are going to have to keep working hard every day to keep producing results. A sales gardener is going to get a slower start, but they will build resources that over time will produce better and better results with the same effort.

You also do not have to be just a hunter or a gardener. You can be a sales hunter by day and a sales gardener by night. Many of the marketing attraction methods include writing articles and getting published, and doing those in the evenings will give you the best of both worlds. If you set up a lead capture form on the web, every morning the sales hunter in you can wake up to a fresh list of interested prospects that are waiting for you to call.

- Thank You!

Posted by Ron McDaniel | Filed Under Blog