“I feel ya man”. Love that phrase. Often we hear people in the business utter phrases like,
“What we do is really a commodity. Our people are what make the difference”. “Or, it’s the relationships that set us apart not an offering or capability.”
I feel ya man. But it’s kinda hard for a prospect that has never done business with you to feel or connect with your great relationship message before they even meet you. And there is nothing about saying your people are great that makes you unique from your competition, right? Yet that “relationship” messaging is a large part of what many of you are leading with to get the attention of prospects. Hmm.
If your people, service, depth of experience in the space are your main differentiating points, how do you make a PROSPECT understand your unique way of delivering those things so well that they cannot wait to experience it? Here are 3 top ways to sell relationship, before you are in a relationship:
Be smart.
Nothing can establish the brilliance of your people as well as regularly producing content that helps your target audience be informed or enhance the approach to their job. Examples:
- Senior credit officer issues a quarterly “outlook on the financing market” piece
- Senior asset manager offers a quarterly “secondary market impacts in construction equipment”
- Senior deal guys write a pieces like “equipment acquisition best practices for healthcare”
A regular dose of this kind of information MASSIVELY builds your credibility, before you ever meet them. Your marketing team should be helping you here.
Deals matter.
Nothing sells like success. Gather messaging that shows how active you are in industries, regions, send tombstones, press releases, case studies. The more success of yours they see actually makes a prospect wonder what kind of magic superpowers you have, particularly when combined with all that “smart guy and gal” content from the previous point.
Tell stories.
We are on a mission to kill, murder in fact, corporate-speak. That vanilla do-nothing, say-nothing overly technical crap that lives on most of your websites. Want them to experience your relationship, tell them the relationship stories. Relationships are connections between people. And people are irrational, emotional smelly things that attach to other emotional things. A story is emotional. Corporate speak is robotic, inhuman…and must die. Please join us in the effort.
So think about your marketing efforts in 2015 and sell relationship by getting them to connect with you personally, emotionally…so they can feel ya man. Build a relationship of content and messaging and your find more opportunities and do more deals. If you ever wanna chat about how this impacts your company, give us a holler.