Trigger events are one of the most powerful customer insights to generate sales leads.
In sales, timing is everything. Discovering a customer had a need is useless. It’s the past tense. If a customer had and solved their problem before you spoke to them, it’s too late.
This is why cold calling is so painful and ineffective. You can call a prospect 10 times, but if you miss the right day to call you lose the sale.
Google was game changing for sales, because it connected customers and salespeople at the moment of need. A trigger event occurred; a customer searched for their options; found a website; filled out a form; and a connection was made.
The simplicity and speed of connecting a sales rep to a customer at a point of need was magical!
I am old enough to remember what it was like to sell before Google and inbound marketing. It was a nightmare: smiling and dialing; tracking itch cycles; and trying to stay top-of-mind so a customer hopefully calls when they have a need.
Within a generation, Google and search marketing flipped the entire sales world on its head. Now, customers are in control. They search. They evaluate their options. They choose.
To win in the game of search and endless options, the key thing to understand about your customers are trigger events:
- What triggers your customers to go to market?
- What triggers them to identify a problem or a need?
- What triggers them to buy?
Simple actions or situations can trigger big purchases. For example, when I ran a recruiting agency we obsessed over the situations that would trigger a company to hire salespeople.
The trigger events ranged from employee turnover to opening a new office to people being promoted, and everything in between. What we found is each trigger event sparked a slightly different path to market.
Sometimes hiring managers would search Google for articles and insights. For instance, if they just let go of one or two reps due to poor performance, they may be feeling gun-shy and looking for insights on “what makes a great salesperson?”
These small insights allowed us to define keywords and referral partners so we could place our brand in the path of search.
To understand a prospect’s path of search we would ask three questions:
- What is the trigger event?
- How do they act or respond to it?
- Who knows about the situation before us?
When we understood the buyer’s journey, we could create marketing assets, content, and calls to action that actually moved the sales needle.
This is why I love trigger events: They give you power to craft the right message for the right need at the right time.
To define your trigger events start with a three step process:
- Define your ideal or core customers. Who do you serve brilliantly?
- Map the buyer’s journey. What are the steps your ideal customers take to move from need identification to purchase to implementation?
- Highlight the trigger events or critical moments in the buyer’s journey where you can make an impact.
This can be a detailed and daunting process, especially if you don’t have a solid process, but it can make the difference between creating marketing that works and marketing that’s lost in the crowd.
Would you like to learn more about trigger events and how they work? Join me on March 18 at 12pm EST / 9am PST for a FREE webinar. I will show you how to build a marketing strategy that actually works! Save your spot today.
