Avoid Overloading Your Customers with Information
Nowadays, customers can get a lot of information about a product they're interested in, whether it's through Google or a quick Calendly meeting request to a salesperson. The customers can sign up for newsletters, social media posts, webinars, white papers, infographics, and blog articles on the product at any time of the day. With the advent of generative AI, we also expect buyers to receive even more high-quality content than ever before.
However, the downside of having more content available is that it can lead to indecision. Your competitors are also sending content to your potential buyers, and the attention of buyers is increasingly divided among the many businesses. When buyers have a lot of information to sort through, they may fall back on cognitive biases like the status quo bias and the safety bias to just stay put. (See our blog post on how to recognize cognitive biases in sales.)
When a prospect stops replying to emails, many salespeople believe that the reason for ghosting is the need for more information. That is untrue. When the customers have already received your best shot at the relevant content, overwhelming them with more information can be counterproductive and make them feel skeptical and pushed. It’s more likely that the buyers don’t know how to make sense of the information at hand.
How do salespeople avoid overloading prospects with information?
Refer customers to resources that are only relevant to the discussion. The resources need to be curated to the customers’ needs. Whenever a buyer receives an irrelevant piece of information, the communication will instantly feel automatic, salesy, and impersonal. When the salesperson does not have the relevant information, admit it. Admitting one's boundaries of knowledge builds trust with customers and creates opportunities for collaborative learning, which is the next point.
Aid the customers to reach their own conclusions instead of telling them what to do. Salespeople should encourage customers to verify information independently and provide them with a framework for learning that makes them feel enabled and confident in their decision-making. Including yourself in the customers’ learning progress shows that you truly care about the specific problem your customers are facing.
Empathize with the complexity of your customer’s problem. Listen to your customers with genuine interest and constantly playback what you hear to ensure the correct understanding. You should simplify the problems whenever possible. In cases where customers have already received a plethora of information to make sense of, try to prioritize information for their problem at hand. This will help them make decisions, and you can only prioritize their problems when you sufficiently empathize with them.
In the era of abundant content and information, the most effective sellers make it easy for customers to understand huge amounts of information and take action with confidence and peace of mind.
