Trigger Event Selling and How it Can Help You Close More Deals

One of the challenges that most sellers face is finding the right opportunity to sell or upsell. Being too forward or too pushy when engaging with potential customers is no longer an effective method to closing a deal. As much as possible, businesses want to sell using a more natural, less outwardly contrived method while still making every effort to engage and finalize sales. This is where trigger event selling can be quite useful.

What Is a Trigger Event?

A trigger event is any occurrence that provides you an opportunity to market or sell a product or service. A number of marketing and sales automation workflows, such as online and social media ads, use trigger events to help businesses reach out to the potential customers. When it comes to using trigger events, timing is everything. You don’t want to promote your brand too early or too late. To make it work effectively, you need to identify the opportunity at the right moment.

How Do Trigger Events Work?

Craig Elias, the author of Shift!: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers, considers timing a silver bullet in sales because it gives brands the opportunity to present their products or services to the right person at the right time when they are most likely to buy.

But how do you determine the right timing? The perfect timing is when a customer has entered the Window of Dissatisfaction. Once a customer is at this phase, you can grab the opportunity by being the first viable seller. During this period, you have a 60-90% rate of closing a deal. Moreover, you have the opportunity to close sales within a shorter cycle and even be able to offer your products or services at a higher price.

How to Do Trigger Event Selling

Since timing is everything when it comes to trigger event selling, it’s important that you know when and how to spot the perfect timing. Here are four types of triggers for marketing with this method:

1. Behavior-based

Monitoring your customers’ behavior is a lot easier when it comes to online selling and marketing. With the availability of analytics tools, you can collect data on how your customers behave and use this information to build a better means of connecting with them and building their trust. These behavior-based triggers can be used when:

• a customer does online search that is relevant to your brand or offerings
• a customer takes up an offer or interacts with an advice you have provided
• a customer responds to an on-site validation such as providing a review to a recent purchase
• a customer triggers a social pattern triggers such as willingness to purchase add-ons along with a recent purchase

2. Engagement-based

Subscriptions and social media interactions also play an important role when it comes to improving your conversion rate. This is handy for brands with a large number of followers, users, or frequent customers, especially those who offer subscription products or services. Subscription reminders are useful when reminding customers about an expiring subscription. You can also use this to upsell a higher tier of subscription. Another way to do engagement-based triggers is when interacting with your followers on social media. You can use these interactions to promote your brand by building a personal connection with your customers. These online interactions can help maintain or build your customers’ interest toward your brand.

3. Event-based

All customers love to know that they are being valued by the brands that they support. For you to show that you care for your customers, you can take advantage of seasonal changes, anniversaries, and even your customers’ birthday to offer sales and boost your conversion rate. You can run time-limited sales and offers. You can apply the scarcity principle during these situations and help improve your chances of closing more sales for your business.

4. Emotion-based

Another way to boost your sales is by giving your customers the opportunity to emotionally connect with your brand. Advertisements, if done properly, can help boost your sales rate. This trigger is often effective in ads and promotions about weight loss, skin care, fashion, and food products. Emotional triggers can help you bank on your customers’ loyalty or take advantage of market trends to increase your sales. Once you are familiar when to time your trigger event sales, you can follow these steps to implement a trigger event sale and marketing approach.

• Step 1. Know the right trigger. Not all trigger types will apply to all customers. It is important to know what type of trigger will work best for each customer segment. You may need to develop several different trigger strategies to meet the unique needs of different customer groups in order to be as effective as possible.
• Step 2. Come up with the right offer. Once you know the right triggers, develop an offer that is compatible. Provide incentives that will truly pique your customers’ interest, or better yet, make them decide to purchase from you.
• Step 3. Present your offer immediately. For your offers to work, they should be presented immediately when the customer has become engaged. The offer you present should reflect your customers’ need or demand to make sure that it is effective.
• Step 4. Record and analyze response. Data is important to help you improve your trigger sales and marketing approach. Keep track of your customers’ responses to help you come up with a better means of promoting your products and services at the right instance.

Trigger event selling has proven its worth to various brands and has changed the way online marketing is conducted. Knowing when and how to use it to your advantage is essential. With constant analysis of your customers’ behavior, you’ll be able to streamline your trigger sales offering and boost your conversion rates.

Implementing the mechanisms to collect and monitor the data to drive these business decisions can turn into burdensome or time-consuming processes for in-house sales and marketing teams. Consider outsourcing these data tasks to a provider that can optimize and fast track processing for you to focus on strategy. Here at Assivo, our experts know how to collect and compile data that can drive decision making and trigger design. Ask us how our teams can help drive your sales with targeted segmentation based on quality data.