The gap between the ‘prospect’ and the ‘buyer’ is not as thin as it sounds. It takes immense effort to convert the former into the latter stage. Unfortunately, very few come prepared to buy a product, and majority appear as potential buyer, who are nothing better than a hard to crack nut. They approach with skepticism, rigidity, negative mindset, millions of questions, comparative analysis. But still, they do change and turn into buyer. With a good understanding of human psychology, buying attitude and marketing knowledge coupled with natural instinct one can convert a prospect into a buyer.

There are 3 types of prospects, who can be converted into buyers.

Cold prospects

All prospects are cold initially. Even if they warm up slowly to a receptive mode and listen to your offering, you have to make enough of efforts to overcome their initial hesitation and arouse their interest. It’s hard to convince why your product or service is the best, but not impossible either once the initial hesitation is handled properly. Every prospect is different, and so is their level of defensiveness. There’s no one formula for all. Keep trying. Keep making contact. Make sure you don’t appear to be too pushy or disturbing. If you annoy the prospect, you have chances of losing him or her forever. Initially make sure you are seen enough, heard enough. So make maximum of contact, through media like email marketing, newsletter, blogging. To curtail boredom mix up couple of media together. Initially try to generate maximum brand exposure and brand recall value.

Warm prospects

Once you overcome prospect’s initial hesitation you have warmed up the person. Don’t forget, it’s just the beginning. You still have to convince him and make the sell. Warm prospect is a person who is ready to make purchase, but not necessarily will buy your brand, can easily get attracted towards your competitors. So you have to be very careful. Talk convincingly, show result-oriented proofs and testimonial evidences proving superiority of your product over others. Assure them that they are making right purchase decision.

Hot prospects

Hot prospects are the people who are already your buyer and perhaps have enjoyed your product or service too. Generally marketers are focused on grabbing new buyers rather than caring for the present ones. It’s more difficult to get new buyers than keeping the present buyers happy. Care for them, stay in touch, give them special schemes or gifts and make them stay loyal to you.

And the market is all yours.