Strategy for Winning Business
The first thing to note is that Business Development and Marketing are similar but different. Marketing raises the profile of the brand to sell more products or services.
Persil, for example, markets its laundry powder through pictures of dirty kids in muddy clothes, showing how clean the clothes can be when washed in Persil. Business Development focuses on the client. Persil does not engage door-to-door salesmen because that would be too expensive. Instead, they make sure that Persil laundry powder is stocked in all the most popular supermarkets and outlets, and they listen to the feedback of their customers.
Selling laundry powder is, however, very different from promoting your services as a professional adviser. Persil cares only about selling more products whether you are the mother of four young boisterous kids or a carer for an elderly incontinent relative. However, when it comes to professional services, the situation is very different.
For professional services, business development is more critical to the business than marketing.
If you are a real estate boundary dispute specialist, your skills will be very different if you are working for an African country or the owner of No. 4 Acacia Avenue.
Focusing solely on non-strategic marketing for real estate boundary specialists could lead to numerous boundary disputes between homeowners, potentially resulting in unprofitable outcomes. In contrast, a single country boundary dispute could yield significantly higher profits. The specialist aims to achieve a reduction in homeowner disputes and an increase in country boundary disputes.
Marketing your skill set rather than the type of client you would like to work for inevitably results in the 80:20 rule where 80% of the work results in 20% of the profits. This rule can shift for professional advisers, but only if the focus is on the client you want to work for rather than your expertise.
The next stage is Client Mapping this looks at what other professionals are also working for this client and to network exclusively with them.
Then you need to convey your message to them in a manner which is memorable, without creating resistance. Most professionals have been to events. They know that there are professionals who have clients they would love to work with in the room, but somehow, there is never the opportunity to talk about work so they do not know who they are or how to convey their message. This is because of the innate fear of the influence of strangers.
From my background in psychology, I know that there are five ways to sidestep this fear or resistance to ‘product push’, which we combine in our methodology. The most effective way to convey your message is through case studies. As from last week, we invite you to submit a fictional client situation in which your services and skills can be of assistance and we will ask others to add to the story.
Case studies also demonstrate that a client very often requires several professional skills to resolve a specific problem, whether from within the same organisation or from different disciplines. A wealthy entrepreneur, for example, will always need an accountant to keep track of his wealth, a lawyer to move it around, and a banker to keep it secure.
A professional who wants to attract good quality work will therefore need to ‘network’ with other professionals, either within or outside of their organisation, to share what they do for their clients through case studies.
The penultimate piece in the jig saw is to record these case studies, which is again easy using modern technology. From our experience, the ideal number of professionals for a recording is six, with each case study lasting just three minutes.
The recordings can then be hosted on our platform, specifically designed for our members to showcase their work for their clients. They can then message each other if they work for similar client types.
Of course, you can write your case study and publish it in your brochure or host it on your website. However, psychology indicates that more people will be attracted to your engaging marketing material if it is hosted on an independent website. This is called the power of aggregation and is another well-understood psychological technique to sidestep the resistance to product push.
I can hear some of you saying - isn’t that what LinkedIn does? Well, no. That may have been the intention of Reid Hoffman when he set it up, but it is not what LinkedIn is now.
In essence, LinkedIn publishes your curriculum vitae of those and encourages you to recruit or find a job through their platform. Although each profile may include facts about the services provided, facts engage the right brain and immediately alert the logical brain to resist what is being promoted.
Case studies engage the left brain and therefore do not create resistance. They are other people’s problems; thus, the services promoted are not being pushed at the reader, and they are human and therefore memorable.
We encourage our members to host curated mini-events with others in their network or with professionals within the same organisation to produce and record case studies relevant to the same client type. We will then publish and promote these online.
If you would like to learn more about our Client First revolution, please contact me on 07979 188 288 or leave a message.