If you happen to be or sell to professionals, consultants or service industry providers, you have a different kind of marketing task. You have to convince them that you are able to provide the kinds of services they need. You are selling a service, not a product.Services are harder to market and sell because they are invisible, intangible, and perishable. Unlike physical products, how do you market and sell something that you can’t see, touch, feel, smell, hear or hold in your hands?
Services have to be experienced. How do you experience financial planning? ‘Or insurance coverage? ‘Marketing consulting? You might call this “experiential marketing.”
You can only experience the results of such things. With insurance, you experience the feelings of security and/or protection that come from knowing if anything goes wrong, you and your family will be covered for expenses or loss or equipment, home, income or life.
In the case of financial or investment planning, what you are buying is several intangible things up front: the confidence you have in the individual who is doing the planning; the team of folks who back up that specific individual; the expertise inherent in that person and their company; the company’s track record and reputation in this field; the length of time this company has been successfully doing this; and the known amount of available time and attention that financial consultant will be spending on your affairs. It comes down to experience and expertise, standing shoulder to shoulder…on your behalf.
In order to attract new clients/customers, you have to reach them, inform them and then motivate them to work with you. There are two major parts to doing this: first, marketing, followed by selling. Marketing is the name for all the things you do to create the environment in which the client can buy from you and not from someone else, your competitor. You do this by reaching your prospective clients with relevant, valuable information that they can use immediately.
This information, in the initial stages, must be free of charge. Even if you are a management consultant, yon write articlesu have to be prepared to give away something for free. You ca to be placed in prominent on or offline publications. You can give presentations and speeches to groups of potential customers, you can send out a free e-zine that is chock full of good ideas for them to use in their own businesses. The list is endless.
Essentially you must constantly build up your own credibility in the mind of your target group, while at the same time, building a bridge between them and you, so when the time arrives – and it will arrive sooner than later — they “know” to reach out to you for the help they need. You have demonstrated that you have the experience and expertise they need. Or if you don’t have it personally, you are with a firm who can back you up with dozens of others who possess such knowledge and/or experience. Moreover, you must convince that potential client that you are prepared to work very hard to solve his or her problem, provide them with the coverage or security they need, or to show them how to earn the kinds of return on investment they seek. Once you market to them, you have to “sell” them on the idea that you and your firm are the ones who can do this for them.
By now, when that prospective client is reaching out to you (he is initiating the contact with you, you don’t necessarily have to contact him or her), there will be few objections raised as to why you should be the one to perform the necessary services for that client. By now, s/he has a problem or an opportunity that they can’t handle by themselves. They respect you and your “know-how” or expertise, or field of experts standing behind you. They expect that you will be able to help them with that situation. It is up to you now to step in and take charge of the situation.
This is when the “selling” side of things has to take over. In the beginning, you did all the things required (essentially, this is “marketing”) that you needed to reach, inform and motivate the potential customer. Then, when that customer indicates that s/he needs help and wonders if you can help her/him with this…you are ready, willing and able to do so. Now you have to close the deal…this is the selling part. We’ll look more into selling in part 2 of this series.
