7 years ago
February 21, 2017

3 Ways to Catch a Buyer’s Attention

This article will discuss three ways to catch buyers’ attention, giving you the tools you need to open the door for your pitches.

Rhys Metler

Every successful sale begins at the same place: You catch buyers’ attention, then make the case for a purchase. If you can’t catch buyers’ attention, you can’t make sales-you can have a 100% success rate in closing sales and still end up with zero sales. Of course, the art of standing out has many different facets, depending on whose attention you want. Do you need to hook someone at the beginning of cold contact? Do you need to convince a prospect to sit up and take your pitch seriously? Or maybe your product has plenty of attention, but you need to stand out from competing vendors. This article will discuss three ways to catch buyers’ attention, giving you the tools you need to open the door for your pitches.

Catching Attention In the Wild

Whether you’re talking real world ad space, banner ads on tangentially related websites, cold calls, or cold emails, any situation where you are engaging a prospect who doesn’t know anything specific about your company or your product requires a similar approach to catch buyers’ attention. You have seconds to pierce the shell of apathy and catch buyers’ attention with cold approaches, so make them count.

You can use what should be your weakness, the fact that you’re a stranger making unprovoked contact (even a static billboard or magazine ad counts), as a tool to catch buyers’ attention. Take the intimate understanding of your target (as an individual or demographic), their problems, and how your product solves those problems, which you’ve no doubt developed as an exceptional salesperson, and find a way to convey it in a very short time.

The goal here is personal-to make that cold contact as warm as possible. Don’t talk about your product, your company history, your anything. The more specifically you can name a problem the prospect has, whether they realized they had it or not, and offer a solution, the more you’ll have their attention.

Getting Hot Leads to Sit Up and Take Notice

This advice applies to phone calls, visitors to your web page, and anything else who is already actively aware of you and what you’re selling. In theory, to catch buyers’ attention working hot leads should be identical to handling cold contact. By paying attention to the prospect’s needs and wants, you can build the insight you need for attention-grabbing rhetoric.

In practice, things work differently. A well-qualified lead has heard it all before making them stop and really listen can be difficult. Discussing a problem and/or solution highly specific to the prospect will always get some attention, but when that’s impossible interesting relevant anecdotes about satisfied customers can work.

As a secret weapon, discussing problems in your own product before they can be brought up by the prospect will certainly catch buyers’ attention-but you had better be able to spin those problems or negate them in some way before you take that route.

Stand Up and Outshine Competitors

One of the hardest scenarios in which to catch buyers’ attention: You have an excellent product, you have an interested buyer, but you’re competing for the sale with another salesperson or vendor.

Added value trumps all other ways to catch buyers’ attention here. Name recognition and other factors melt away quickly when you can offer something others can’t. Excellent customer service, a simpler purchase process, bonus items, the exact value added matters little so long as it exists and you advertise that value successfully.

Don’t forget that the best way to add value for a customer may be the cheapest: building fondness on a personal level means you can catch buyers’ attention and never let go of it, even if other companies have something flashier to offer.

Rhys Metler

Rhys is a tenacious, top performing Senior Sales Recruiter with 15+ years of focused experience in the Digital Media, Mobile, Software, Technology and B2B verticals. He has a successful track record of headhunting top performing sales candidates for some of the most exciting brands in North America. He is a Certified Recruitment Specialist (CRS) and has expert experience in prospecting new business, client retention/renewals and managing top performing sales and recruitment teams. Rhys enjoys spending quality time with his wife, son, and daughters, BBQing on a hot summer day and tropical vacations.

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