Sticking with issues of selling in the service industry, I link you today to a wonderful piece from RainToday.com that gets into this issue a bit deeper than I did on Monday.
It’s pretty simple to see that one of the biggest problems in solid lead generation — when you don’t have a tangible product to sell — is that of getting the prospect to visualize exactly what it is that you’re selling. From the RainToday piece…
“How do you make the intangible tangible? Take a cue from your local ice cream shop… let your clients and prospects have a taste. Professional services businesses can do this by creating and leveraging offers and experiences that allow potential buyers to see, touch, and taste a bit of what you will provide for them as a client.”
For my business, that means getting out there everyday and doing the things that most people aren’t willing to do. For example, I have spent a ridiculous amount of time over the past month in building relationships with establishments, then working out trade agreements with them for me to do some work in exchange for the ability to use their offices to hold free seminars.
Of course, that means that I’ve also spent a good deal of time in actually developing those seminars. Not to mention the time taken to deliver them. What has it netted me so far? Little in the way of revenue, but it has made me recognizable in my area and gotten me a solid prospects list.
And it’s made my services more tangible to those prospects.
Another exercise that I’ve been actively pursuing is pitching a weekly column to some newspapers (tip of the hat to Jeffrey Gitomer on that idea). My pitch is simple: I’ll gladly commit to writing the column at no charge — all I’m asking for is a guaranteed news hole in the paper on the same day each week. This is proving to be more difficult than I would have hoped, but that doesn’t deter me from working it. But once it happens (and it will), the rewards of it will come ten-fold.
As Gitomer says… “Next time someone tells you ‘never,’ that means ‘not for at least an hour’.”
Success in selling anything is about doing the things that very few others are willing to do. It means being creative… doing the unexpected… and never giving up.
The trouble with selling services is that most people are unwilling to do just that.
As I continue to work on my small business marketing efforts, I’m always on the lookout for interesting insights that may help me to see different ways of ‘getting the word out’ about what I do. As anyone who sells anything knows, it’s not always a black-and-white effort to attract serious leads.
I’ve never hidden the fact that I’m a loyal reader of RainToday.com. I subscribe to their newsletters, I visit their site several times per week, and I take a lot of their advice and put it into action.
It’s a rare day here on AccountHUNTER that I consider blogging something related to cold calls, but 
How do you perceive your relationships with your customers? Just as important of a question… how do you perceive your prospects?
Every day, as you sit in your office trying to figure out how to get more potential clients onto your prospecting list, what are you actually doing? Are you actively prospecting and then qualifying those prospects, or are you spending the bulk of your time trying to convince people who, quite frankly, don’t want to be convinced of anything except that it’s beer-thirty?
Seems like a simple question, doesn’t it? But is it really so simple?
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A new Giant Eagle opened in my neighborhood yesterday. I live in a relatively small suburb of Columbus, but we’re accustomed to having pretty much everything under the sun, when we want it – if we really need it or not. So, I was naturally curious to see what the fuss was about (and why Kroger had spent the last six months doing a complete overhaul, to the point where I just stopped going).
AccountHUNTER 