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What is Conceptual Selling And How Marketing Can Help

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Creating a watertight sales strategy doesn’t happen by chance, especially if you rely on tried and tested methods that your competitors can easily copy.

Conceptual selling is just one of the many sales techniques that can align your products more closely with your customers. Here is an overview of conceptual selling along with the marketing techniques you can employ to strengthen your sales efforts and ultimately boost your conversions.

What Is Conceptual Selling?

Conceptual selling was developed by Robert Miller and Stephen Heiman and is also known as the Miller Heiman process. It is a sales method that is based on the idea that people buy for their own reasons, which may be different to the reasons the seller had in mind when originally marketing the product.

The process involves taking the time to understand your customers so that as a business looking to market its products, you can provide value with each interaction and ultimately close the sale. This aim is achieved by essentially covering all bases as to why someone would want your products or services so that you can close any potential gaps.

Five Characteristics Of Conceptual Selling

Prepare in advance – Take the time to conduct research about your prospective clients in advance, considering their specific needs in relation to your products or services.

Align buyer and seller objectives – Both parties have objectives regarding what they want and can offer from the partnership. Aligning objectives is about working to meet in the middle so that you can provide what the buyer wants, and the buyer gets on board with what you can offer them.

Control and run the meeting – Develop a strategy for the meeting so that you can structure it, which will keep everything on task.

Make the most of your time – Make sure the meeting is constantly moving forward so that the deal can be closed. Bring the attention back to the objectives of the meeting.

Differentiate your solution – Show how what you are offering to the customer is different from that of other products or services, so that your partnership is based on shared values.

Examples Of Marketing Techniques

  • Adwords
  • Banner advertising
  • Email
  • Lead generation
  • PPC
  • SEO
  • Social media

So how can marketing help with conceptual selling? Marketing might seem like a one-sided process but it is anything but, especially with the range of data that modern digital techniques can provide in return.

Let’s take SEO and the first objective of conceptual selling (prepare in advance) as an example. SEO consists of many different aspects including technical elements that make your site more or less user friendly. However, at its core SEO is about finding keywords relating to your business based on what people are searching for.

In many cases, the keywords may surprise you as they may not directly correlate with how you market your product or the original purpose of the product. Ignoring such searches means you are decimating your potential conversions. Instead, you would look to incorporate these user queries where it makes sense to do so.

The same logic applies to any marketing technique when it comes to conceptual selling. That’s because it comes back to considering that the customer purchases the product or service for their own reasons. Marketing can help you uncover these reasons in a broad sense because it provides the information you need to best understand your customers’ needs. For example their search intent, age, interests, average spend, buying habits etc.

Digital Marketing Agency Nottingham

Are you interested to learn more about conceptual selling and the marketing efforts you can use to boost your conversions?

Imaginaire Digital helps businesses in Nottingham and beyond perfect their marketing strategies. Some of the services we provide include website design, SEO, PPC, Adwords management, social media marketing, lead generation and much more.

Ready to get started? Simply book your free consultation and we’ll get to work on devising a strategy tailored to your business. Or, drop us an email or call us on 0115 971 8908 to find out more.

You can even get a free website review from our specialists. Just head over to our free website review page and we’ll take a look!

I write about all things marketing and love to focus on data. You'll see topics from SEO and PPC to web design and CRO.

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