Never has this been more true than in the current climate.
You can communicate regularly with your propsects, lure them within arms reach, tempt them with lots of offers and still they don’t buy from you. What next?
Well sometimes sitting in your own comfort zone is what prevents those “hot” prospects from taking things further. It’s necessary for you to start mixing in their circles, making yourself known to them in a more familiar environment.
As a starting point, find out what’s happening in their industry, what networking events are considered worthwhile and where the people you need to talk to actually go to do their own networking. You need to handle this carefully though because you don’t want to scare them off by trying the hard sell as soon as you meet them. You need to ask them questions, show an interest in the current challenges they face and build a rapport so that when they ask you what you do, voila! You match your service offer to their needs as far as you can.
A good example of this was a voice coach who came to us because she wasn’t winning the type of work she was ideally placed to deliver. She is a former actress with a great pedigree, yet she was getting no interest from her marketing activities. She was tweeting, attending business networking events, sending a weekly newsletter to her contacts, updating her website regularly and spending in the region of £200 a month on Google Adwords. All these activities accounted for approximately 40% of her work week.
The fundamental mistake that she had made was not targeting. She was sending the same communications to her entire database, relevant or not! She had also thrown herself into a box-ticking exercise whereby she was busy doing things every day but actually not doing any of them with the necessary focus, nor thinking of integrating strategies to achieve more. To a certain extent, she was guilty of the “build it and they’ll come” mentality.
By having a clear strategy in place that included sector-specific targeting our client managed to increase her exposure in the right places and made sure that all her communications were relevant to the prospects she was contacting, resulting in her positioning herself as an expert in her field for their sector.
For more information contact me.
