Everyday, we are doing business with a world that has access to more information than ever before. Every school of thought can be researched quickly. Niche markets have opportunities like never before, and ‘long-tail’ businesses are still making good profits thanks to search engines, readily available and detailed amounts of data and targeted marketing. Education is an everyday commodity. Communication is fast and word of mouth referrals that were once passed between friends and family in a localised areas can now be blasted around the globe in a matter of seconds.

Consumers are educating themselves prior to purchasing. In the travel industry, statistics have shown that the average traveller makes up to 38 visits to travel sites before making a decision to book.

Transparency then, it would seem, is the word of the day. Your business marketing strategies can no longer present misleading, obscure glossy-covered product images or far-fetched tag lines to convince people of your product or service value. Now value must be delivered consistently and openly to gain long term customer loyalty and repeat purchase. Not to mention the most powerful of all marketing tools – word of mouth referrals.

Value must be delivered consistently and transparently to gain long term customer loyalty. Click To Tweet

So, it puzzles me how professionals in sales and marketing continue to thrash out old sales tactics of “my life used to be this, and magically now it is this, and if you pay me a whole pile of money I can turn you into a superstar overnight. I am going to email you a few times everyday my ‘personal’ automated messages to convince you that it is an amazing once-in-a-lifetime deal, until you get so tired of seeing my emails that you will either decide to sign-up or blacklist me forever.”

The funny thing is, this method is actually still working. But I can’t help but wonder – for how long? Surely consumers will eventually realise that the daily automated emails are not personal messages from the superstar living in the mansion on the hill. How anyone can possibly believe that these professionals are personally nurturing 50,000 people who flow through their sales funnel is beyond me. Surely the world is more intelligent than that?

So there must be value in treating our customers as intelligent researchers. The decision to purchase, commit to a contract, or hire a professional is a well thought-out, carefully negotiated deal. It begins long before the transaction takes place and has come from a realisation of a need that has evolved over time. Nurturing a lead, therefore, begins long before your customer has hit the ‘sign-up’ button or booked into your webinar.

The decision to purchase is a well thought-out, carefully negotiated deal. #consumerbehaviour Click To Tweet

There is something to be said in all of this for under-promising and over-delivering.

If a bold glossy image is what you have covered your product or service with, you had better ensure that the contents of your offerings are much more impressive or the ‘opt-out’ button will be the next one they press.