Many people confuse marketing, with selling. The truth is that selling is a small subset of marketing. Marketing also includes competitive analysis, advertising, pricing, distribution, and customer service. As a professional, you must have a comprehensive approach to marketing that you balance and blend with selling.When you plan your marketing strategies, consider these critical principles:
1. The best and least expensive form of advertising is to deliver high quality service to your clients. Remember that your clients are the ultimate judge of how good your quality is. Therefore, ask your clients early and often if they are getting what they want. Then after you have given them what they wanted, ask for referrals. A happy client is the best salesperson your business can havethey do all your prospecting and marketing for you.
2. Base your business on sincere personal relationships. Nobody wants to be treated like a number. Get to know your prospects as people, not just clients. Harvey McKay, the SHARK man, has his salespeople answer 66 personal questions about their customers. And they sell envelopes. What do you know about your prospects and clients? Is it written down and easily accessible?
3. The fancy dinner, the six hour golf game, and the marathon interviews are a waste of time. The most important principle in building name recognition and relationships is frequency of contact. This must include all forms of contact with your prospects and clients. Evaluate every incidence of contact, such as the phone answering machine or receptionist, the note cards you send, the invoice or proposal you use, the way you leave messages, and even the type of printer you use. Each contact with your client must be blended and balanced to compliment your strategy and image, and reinforce your message.
4. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. The easiest thing to measure is your activity. How many phone calls do you make a day? How many letters do you send out a day? How many appointments do you have each day? All of these things are related to marketing and are easy to measure.You can also measure newsletters, association meetings, cards picked up, cards followed up on, and contacts that develop into business.
The key is to identify those activities that produce the best results based on your strategy and then measure, measure, measure. Put these key activities on charts where you have to look at them every day. You will amaze yourself when you force yourself to measure your activities.
A word of caution: Make sure you measure only a few critical things. Otherwise you’ll spend more time with charts and computers and too little time with your clients building personal relationships.
Now a brief word on selling. Selling is the fine art of persuasion. The master salesperson will ask a lot of open-ended questions and do a lot of listening. The purpose of good questions is to identify the needs and wants of the client, and what is truly important to them.
You know exactly what you deliver to a client. Clients, on the other hand, know what their problems are and if they like you. They don’t know if you can help them solve their problems.
The purpose of a strategic marketing system is to get you in front of a lot of clients with problems that you can help solve. SELLING is the process of first determining who should buy from you and second persuading those with the correct needs to want what you sell. If you follow this approach you will always have quality referrals because you will be delivering results where they are truly needed and wanted.
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