Modern Marketing Misconceptions Your Appointment Setter Must Avoid

About a month ago, the Harvard Business Review published a three part series that dealt with modern misconceptions among marketing professionals today.

But first, just what is being meant by 'modern'? It's modern because these misconceptions are not only relatively new, they're new because they're spawned from a new idea that originally was very ideal. At the same time, this ideal actually brought very positive results. The misconceptions however are the result of acting upon that ideal in the wrong way.

So what is this ideal? It's simply a strong focus on the consumer and less upon the business. It's the sort of marketing approach that is actually emphasized by channels like social media. Nobody wants a pushy salesman who doesn't care about what customers think. Everyone loves the salesman who kowtows to their demands for information and freedom of choice.


However, the series should give you some food for thought and you might want to ask yourself if the latter can also be taken to unhealthy extremes. If you still can't figure out how this is possible, then here are just two ways that a customer-centric view will go overboard when it comes to setting appointments:

• Information Overload – When you bombard a prospect with too much information in an attempt to 'engage' with them, that excessive information puts a mental strain that either makes them hesitant to buy or they buy but they have difficulty in understanding what they just spent their money on. In B2B, successes from qualified leads don't always resolve instantaneously. Rather, the real success is determined by the relationship that follows. That relationship will be very dependent on how both parties understand each other.

• Decision Anxiety – Decision anxiety can be the result of just having too many choices. Be careful when a customer asks if there are any more alternatives. Even if you say there are, you might better off gently putting your foot down and saying that this is as far as they can take their pick.

What's rather odd, however, is that such excesses aren't really beneficial to the customer either. Hence, it's not really customer-centric but simply based on the distortion of the idea. What you need to do is purify the complications and make things simpler for your prospects:

• Filter Out Junk Information And Jargon – If you're selling a product that, in fact, comes with a lot of complications, then simply filter out information that is not being asked for. Reduce the jargon and try to educate your prospect on your product just using layman's terms.

• Limit Choices – As with information, limit the choices you offer accordingly to the prospect's capacity to weigh options. Make sure the decision won't tax their minds (even if it's upon their insistence).

These distortions and misconceptions are prevalent in all businesses and across industries. They could be in the minds of your own marketing department or they could also be in the minds of those working in outside lead generation services. Regardless, your lead generator should be able to avoid today's marketing misconceptions.