From a marketing standpoint, there are really only six types of people in the world: Suspects, Prospects, Investigators, Evaluators, Customers and Repeat Customers.
- Suspects are people who you think might have a need for your product.
- Prospects are people who do have a need for your product.
- Investigators have become actively involved in the buying process.
- Evaluators want the solution your product offers, but they need to be convinced that your product can actually deliver that solution for them.
- Customers are people who have already purchased something from you.
- Repeat customers are people who have purchased more than one product from you.
Everyone on the face of the earth can be categorized into one of these categories — sometimes they can be categorized into more than one category.
Suspects = The Market Majority
Of all of the people in your target market — the people to whom you are advertising — the vast majority are Suspects.
The distinction between the Suspects and Prospects comes down to a matter of need.
Suspects are the people in your target market who you think *might* have a need for your product. Prospects, on the other hand, are the people in your market who actually *do* have a need for your product.
This is, of course, a critical distinction because there is one basic and unavoidable truth in marketing… no one will buy your product unless they have a need for it.
Based on this, you always face a situation in your marketing where the majority of the people in your market are Suspects who don’t need what you are selling and won’t respond to your advertising, no matter what you do.
How to spot a suspect: If they are likely to see your ad, they are a suspect.
Common suspects: Searchers who use a particular keyword in Google, people on your JV partner’s list, random visitors to your website or blog, members of a forum you frequent.
Prospects Identify Themselves Through Their Behavior
Since you can’t ask every single person in your market whether or not they need what you are selling, the next best thing is to identify prospects through their behavior.
Remember, in order to be a prospect for you, the person must have a true need for what you are selling (or at least believe that they do).
So the way you can identify prospects is if they behave in a way that is consistent with the way someone would behave if they had a need for your product.
For instance, you become a prospect in a car lot when you drive in, get out of your car, and start reading window stickers — your behavior is the same kind of behavior that someone would do if they were in the market for a new car.
You might become a prospect in a yoga studio when you register for a free clinic. It’s highly unlikely that you would take the time to register for a free yoga clinic if you hadn’t the slightest interest in yoga.
How to spot a prospect: The best way to spot a prospect is to deliberately create an offer that only a qualified prospect would really want, put it out there, and when people respond to your offer, you can safely assume they are a prospect.
Common prospects: Newsletter subscribers, free report opt- ins, people who click on your ad, teleseminar attendees.
Investigators Have Their Radar Up
Investigators are aware of their need for a given product and they are aware that you have a product that might meet their needs. They are Prospects who become actively involved in the buying process. They will most likely end up making a purchase, although it may not be from you.
The distinction between prospects and investigators is really a matter of mindset.
Prospects, when viewing your offer have the “I’m not sure I need this” mindset. Investigators, on the other hand, have the “I definitely need a solution like this, but I’m not sure this one will truly deliver the right solution.”
How to spot an investigator: Because investigator status is really a mindset, you can’t really determine whether someone is an investigator by their behavior. But if someone reads more than a few lines of your sales letter, I think it’s safe to say they are an investigator. If they watch your demo video, they are likely an investigator.
Common investigators: sales letter readers
Evaluators are in “Try it on for Size” Mode
Once an Investigator makes the choice to “try out” your product, they become an “Evaluator.” Someone who takes a car for a test drive for the first time has just progressed into the Evaluator stage.
Evaluation doesn’t always have to be a physical evaluation, a bride-to-be looking at wedding rings in a catalog and mentally “trying-on” the styles that appeal to her, is as much an Evaluator as the person in our car-buying example.
How to spot an evaluator: Depending on what kind of ‘trial’ options you offer, it might be very easy to spot evaluators based on their behavior. If they sign up for and *use* your software under a 30-day trial, then they are evaluators. If, however, you don’t have a trial option, evaluators might be people who read your testimonials or view your how-it- works video.
Common evaluators: 30-day trial users, ‘lite version’ users, testimonial readers.
Customers Have Purchased from You Once
As soon as a financial exchange takes place, you are now dealing with a customer. No matter how small the price, the simple act of giving you money in exchange for goods or services creates a significant status change.
As long as your customers get at least what they expect (hopefully your solution will exceed their expectations) then they will have breached the trust barrier and are much more likely to buy other products from you in the future and become… Repeat Customers.
Repeat Customers Have Purchased More Than Once
The rarest of all species in the marketing world is the Repeat Customer — yet this is where great businesses are built.
Treat your repeat customers like gold, because that is what they are — the most profitable people in your world.
Once you understand these different types of people, you can begin to evaluate your sales system and it’s different components in light of how well it serves the needs of these 6 people.
Related posts:
- Qualities of a Great LGO As I mentioned in my previous post about LGO’s,...
- Lead Generation Offer (LGO): Purpose and Common Types The LGO serves only one purpose. It gets qualified...
- 3 Reasons Why People Don’t Buy 1. They Don’t Want It (As commonsensical as this...
- Your Changing World as Explained by X-plane 2 Million TV’s in Toilets? Did you know there...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice blog post. I have been told that at any one point in time, 3% of the people are ready to buy your product or any product. Another 7% are thinking about buying the product. That leaves 90% are your marketing suspects. Makes our job of marketing an uphill task!
Hi Al, thanks for your comment.
I completely agree with those numbers, but some portion of that 90% are also prospects — they have a need for your product, but not a *current* need, so they aren’t ready to even think about buying your product, yet they probably will buy your product (or someone else’s) at some point.
This 90% is the audience that is best served with free content (blogs, newsletters, special reports, etc.)
Great article Doug.
By breaking “people” down to the lowest common denominator you have given us something more to think about. It is much easier to sell to someone if you know where they are in the purchase decision.
What you explained above is the exact reason we have different autoresponder accounts for different prospects or customers. As marketers we must give the right message to the right person in order to sell them anything.
Thanks,
Rick
Rick, thanks for stopping by!
Since you mention AR accounts, one feature of most ARs that I think is vastly underutilized is the ‘unsubscribe from’ feature. This is where you can automatically unsubscribe someone from a list when they are added to another list.
I use this all the time to automatically keep my lists segmented.
For example, before I launch something new, I will create a ‘Prospect’ list from my existing autoresponders. I do this by selecting all of the lists I think are likely to have a need for my offer — and I add all of these people to a new list called xProspects (with x being the name of my new offer).
Now, when someone buys or opts-in for that new offer, they are added to a new list and I use the ‘unsubscribe from’ feature to remove them from the xProspects list. This way, I know that when I send an email to my xProspects list, I know that I am sending it to people who have *not* purchased the product.
Excellent Doug,
One of the philosophies we have in our Charitable Trust is to meet people at their point of need and lead them out of their valley, rather than shouting from the mountain tops that this is where they need to be.
That is very similar to the sales process we need to find out where a person is at and then lead them from that point to the place where you can make a sale if you have something that will meet their need. It involves having integrity and only selling what actually helps rather than selling for the sake of it. This builds reputation and trust.
All this involves interaction which is why I believe that social media is key.
Please delete the above. I wasn’t finished editing it when it posted itself. Here’s what I was trying to say, completed and all (I hope) typos fixed:
Excellent article, Doug–I’m going to tweet a link. To your six, I’d add one more: Evangelists or Ambassadors: those who not only purchase from you, but encourage others to do the same. Since it costs 5-10 times as much to bring in a new customer through traditional means as to bring back an old one or have that old one bring a referral, that’s a very important segment (I discuss how to create them at some length in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, BTW). Businesses that embrace a mission to create evangelists are likely to see greater profitability.
{ 1 trackback }