How to give your clients and prospects what they MOST want
I once worked for a company where, no matter our suggestions (We were essentially part of the management team), they didn’t consider them worthy of implementation.
That was fine. Except that they went on to spend thousands of dollars on an external consultant who offered nearly-identical advice they also failed to implement.
Evidently this is not uncommon.
I’m reading John Jantsch new book, The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself
He was hired by a company to design a marketing system for their new insurance agents. John suggested that they stop telling these newbies to create a call “list of a hundred people they knew” (no matter how much or how little they knew them) and just phone them up to try to sell them.
Everyone in sales — and certainly everyone in Multi-Level Marketing — have been told to do this very thing.
The problem is neither the person selling nor the person on the other end of the phone (likely feeling dread, coercion, or even guilt because they don’t want to hurt your feelings) enjoys the conversation.
I don’t know whether or not John Jantsch was a household name at the time the firm enlisted his help, but when he suggested new agents take the 100-people-they-know List and “instead of pitching them . . . introduce them to other business, services, and opportunities,” they fired him.
Guess that wasn’t exactly what they wanted to hear.
I’m thinking people don’t really “get” the Give-First Philosophy. Maybe intellectually, they think they do. But when the rubber meets the road, the default behavior is to push their products and services to whomever they think needs them.
The other day on a social networking site I belong to, a businesswoman new to the site introduced herself and what she was up to. Suddenly, another service provider jumped in — he didn’t even say Hello or Welcome — to tell this woman (and presumably the rest of us) all about why she should buy advertising from him.
I call this Show Up and Throw Up Method, and just as it sounds, it’s not very attractive.
Even if this scenario doesn’t describe anything you’d be caught dead doing, it’s a real paradigm shift to go beyond The Golden Rule to what has been referred to as The Platinum Rule. Essentially, the Platinum Rule is ‘treating others as THEY would like to be treated.’
In tangible terms, this means that what a person wants may not even be what you’re selling, or even related to what you are selling.
At least not for the time being.
The challenge is to really get to know what your prospects and potential clients want in life and then offer solutions for that. This may be something you can develop, but oftentimes it is another product, service provider, or resource.
Said another way, the question in all cases that we want to answer is ‘What does my prospect MOST want?’
On page 156 of John’s book
Suppose you are a CPA who works with small business clients, offers John. What do they most want?
The natural assumption is that if they are your customers, they obviously want to be able to understand a balance sheet. However, it’s only when you dig deeper that you come to understand that what they MOST want is “to get more customers and get home earlier in the evening.”
This is when you really begin to tap into the magic of The Referral Engine. Armed with this knowledge of what you (potential) client want MOST, how can you give it to them?
In this example, how can you help your small business clients to get more customers and get home from work earlier?
Well, maybe you’ve learned through social media how to get more customers and really enjoy this. “Why not help your customers set up a blog, learn how to use Facebook, or optimize their Web sites for local search?” asks John.
You get the idea?
How does this concept expand your mind about what is possible in your business? How (and in what ways) will you give up the need to sell, and instead genuinely help your prospects, clients, and customers get what they most want?
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image by Kevin Lawver, used with permission under a Creative Commons License
