by Jim Noh-Kuhn, Dream Business Coach
I have noticed a tendency of small businesses to market by selling, and to sell by marketing. It’s important to remember that these two activites are different. Marketing is the attraction of potential customers to your business; converting a target audience to become potential clients. Selling is the act of converting those potential clients to actual clients by understand their needs and meeting those needs.
As Ron Willingham points out in his excellent book “Integrity Selling for the 21st Century“, selling is about the personal relationship you have with a potential client. It’s about solving their problem, whether that solution involves your product or service or not. If the potential client sees that you have their best interests in mind, then they are much more likely to reward you with business and/or a referral.
Ah – the referral. That brings us to the best business strategy for marketing: word of mouth recommendations. It may not be fancy or sexy, but it has always been more effective towards getting more new paying customers than anything else. And in this day and age of social media and electronic connections, that word of mouth can spread quickly.
But word of mouth is not something controllable, and your marketing plan needs to be controlled (and measured). If selling is about solving a potential client’s need, then target marketing is about reaching people whose needs could be solved with your products and services (if they only knew that you existed). For example, if your business is installing kitchen cabinets, then your target audience is everyone who needs new cabinets.
An important question at this point is whether your marketing plan includes those people who don’t yet know they need new cabinets. How comfortable are you in “creating” a problem, where perhaps a potential client can’t afford new cabinets. This is where your company’s values come into play. That’s why it is so important to articulate and know your values upfront, before a marketing plan is defined.
The next time you’re faced with a potential customer, ask yourself what their real need is, and help them solve that. And the next time you’re faced with spending marketing dollars, ask yourself two questions: what are my values, and who is my target audience? Then, satisfying their needs will feel truly fulfilling.
