There was a time when a sales person didn’t have to worry very much about scaring prospects away. In most places, and for most products, the prospect simply had nowhere else to go. Those days are gone forever. The global competition created by the internet has brought scaring prospects to the forefront of a salesperson’s concerns. Scaring prospects can happen at any stage of the sales funnel, and usually drives the prospect away for good. They simply have too many other options that don’t make them feel pressured or anxious about a purchase. If your sales numbers are sagging, it’s possible that you’re scaring prospects away. Here are three ways to avoid scaring prospects.

Value Pricing

You don’t want to have to slash prices every time you need to make a sale. Your prospects want to feel like they’re getting a good value for the price they end up paying. If you won’t lower your prices, and can’t raise the value proposition for the customer, you’ll end up scaring prospects away. The trick is to increase the value of your products, so you don’t have to lower the prices. You can do this through content marketing, which allows prospects to learn about your products and services, and how they can directly benefit them, before dealing with a salesperson. By the time a prospect sits down with a salesperson, they’ll already understand how your products can meet their individual needs.

Leading, not Pushing

To avoid scaring prospects, your marketing campaign must lead them toward a sales decision, instead of trying to push them into one. The nurturing process is different for every prospect, and can’t be based on a one-size-fits-all model. That’s why many businesses choose to automate the first few stages of the marketing process. Using email marketing, social media marketing, and inbound marketing helps to automatically draw in prospects who are interested in your products and services. Once drawn in, a steady stream of updated content helps them move from interested to invested. At that point, the automated nurturing is complete, and the prospect can be moved over to the sales department.

Providing Quality Content

Problems with your content can quickly derail all of your marketing efforts by scaring prospects away. In the early stages of the sales funnel, prospects are looking for useful, easily accessible information to help guide their decision-making. If your emails are poorly written, arrive too often, or appear to be spam, prospects won’t open them, and will probably block them. If your website is cumbersome, hard to navigate, or difficult to read, they won’t bother trying to dig for the information they want. Prospects will simply go to another, better structured website. To avoid scaring prospects, make sure all of your content channels are well structured, follow a logical process, and are free from factual and grammatical errors. Good marketing draws them in; good content keeps them coming back.