How to Be a Showstopper in Your Market

If you want to be a showstopper in your market, then you must be innovative. Not only innovative — you must WOW prospective customers or clients with your amazing ingenuity. To be a showstopper, you must amaze people — not only amaze them with what you're offering them, but also amaze them with how you're offering it!

Good marketers can sell almost anything. If you also have an innovative product, then you can WOW them with the product and with the amazing ways you choose to promote and sell it! What are these innovative ways? That’s the problem. If you were informed about all these great sales techniques they wouldn’t be innovative, would they? But, think first before you act.

Be Innovative in Your Sales and Promotion

What's the most important aspect of your business?

• Your product? No!
• Your service? No!
• Your sales technique? No!

Think of the most important objective of your business. You likely think it's to make money. Wrong!! Here are the four major objectives of your business (in their correct order):

1. To understand the objective of your customer. What do they want the product or service to achieve?
2. To meet your customer’s objective when you provide them with that product or service.
3. To make your customers or clients happy that they purchased from you.
4. To make money.

Listen to what your customer is saying. You learn nothing when you're talking, but you learn a great deal if you listen when your customer talks. Your objective means nothing to your customer; your customer’s objective means everything to you. Fail to understand that and you won’t make money.

Tips on How to Be a Showstopper

Most people start out in business to make money. They hope to become another Bill Gates, Alan Sugar or Richard Branson. Each of these, whether by accident or design, achieved all of the above in the order above.

Whatever it is, yours is a competitive business. There are practically no businesses any more that have no competitors. Since they likely all offer much the same types of products, you have to be stellar at selling yours to your prospects. To achieve that, you must listen to them and know what they want.

So, you want to be a showstopper with your business? Here are some tips:

• Shut up and listen to your customer!
• Make sure you know exactly what they want from you.
• Make sure you know what their objective is — i.e., what do they want to achieve by buying the product or service of yours?
• Provide them with a product that enables them to meet that objective.
• Don’t sell your customers what they want; sell them what they need!

Be Innovative and Honest

Listen to the problems your customers have, then sell them products that solve their problems. If you have nothing in your product list that can do that, then tell them. That will gain their trust, so the next time you have a product they will listen to you.

There are plenty of marketing tricks, but none work better than honesty. If you want to be a showstopper in your market, being honest may not be innovative, but it's not far off it in sales. Having made that point, how can you be innovative in your market other than being honest?

You could be innovative with your product. If you're developing a new product, do it with marketing in mind. Richard Branson worked from a railway carriage to get his first record store going in Oxford Street, London. He chose Oxford St. with his friend Nik Powell because of its footfall traffic. He created Virgin Record Store as a place where people could meet, listen to records and chat to staff. It worked!

Richard Branson was a showstopper in the record industry because he was an innovator. He's not the only one. Ray Kroc got the idea of franchising out fast-food stores on an individual basis. He was an innovator (and showstopper) in the fast-food industry.

What Have You Learned?

If you've read this through, you'll have learned that to be a showstopper, you must be innovative. There's not a lot in marketing that hasn't been thought of before … or so people thought prior to Ray Kroc, Richard Branson and Tesco founder Jack Cohen: “Stack them high and sell them cheap.” Many attribute this to Frank W. Woolworth, the “Five and Dime” creator, but it was Jack Cohen.

These guys were showstoppers. If you want to be like them, be innovative. Get a new idea and put it into being. Many of those guys above only made it through one brilliant idea. You can be the same if you're innovative and come up with a showstopper.

Here's one idea to get you started: Use YouTube to create original videos for your business. YouTube videos can go viral within seconds if you have the right story to tell about the right product or service. YouTube videos aren't generally copyrighted, so you can use the one of your choice to promote your new idea. Be innovative and be a showstopper. You can do it. You can do them both!

Sonal Patil is a research analyst at Market.Biz. She's keen to handle and use market data for developing marketing strategies.