The first step in any good marketing strategy is to know your prospects. Understanding what is influencing them, what is driving them to buy the product or service you’re offering is critical.
This applies equally regardless of whether you’re selling hamburgers, widgets or high end professional services.
Once you know what their problems are, what they are looking for in a solution and how they want to buy that solution you can better engage with them, better demonstrate how you can meet their needs and…eventually sell them your service.
Its not a matter of talking about how good you are, its all about talking about what your prospects need – and building a rapport with them.
One way of building rapport, particularly relevant to service organisations, is to provide the potential client/customer with information that will help them make their buying choice or understand the problem they are facing
The reason this is particularly useful for service organisations is that often the client may have a limited understanding of the problem the face – and virtually no understanding of the solution they need.
There’s no strict rules about what this information may be. Just remember that it has to be something that is of value to them right now.
It might be a tip sheet on their problem, a guide to the processes involved or a free report that outlines how people in a similar situation have dealt with this problem. And, avoid the desire to talk too much about yourself in this type of document. This is an information exchange, a building of rapport – not your sales process.
To ensure you get value from the information you generate you should have some, however small, level of interaction between your business and the potential client. It shouldn’t be difficult for the prospect to get the information – simply visiting a particular web page, providing an email address, calling your office or completing a simple request form should be sufficient.
You’re not trying to get the person in the door straight way, this is an investment in future clients.
For a no obligation discussion about marketing your organisation feel free to give me a call.
