Sales and Sales Management Blog

June 27, 2008

Image vs Substance

Filed under: Financial Services, Personal Marketing, branding, business, developing expert reputation, marketing, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 9:05 am
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A couple of days ago I received an email from a financial planner regarding an article I wrote some months ago titled “The Medium, the Message, and the Financial Planner.” The planner brought up a question about the difference between one’s image and the substance of one’s practice and questioned my assertion that a financial planner needs to develop a public image as an expert and that to do that he or she need not be technically the best in their field but rather they only need be competent.

My reader thought that I was way off the mark in encouraging less than the best to become recognized as an expert, and that by becoming so recognized, they would be damaging the profession. His complaint was that:

“(I) have spent years studying tax law, estate planning, investments, insurance, and other areas that are critical to helping a client formulate a financial plan. I’ve invested most of my adult life in becoming a real expert, not an image.

“What you call developing an expert image and reputation I call branding which in my opinion is nothing more than creating a false impression of who the planner is. I see all of this ‘marketing’ to be degrading to me and my profession. I am not a salesperson as you say in your article. I am a skilled, trained professional. I don’t market any more than a specialist physician or attorney markets.

“Certainly, there are financial planners that market their practice and many have very lucrative practices. I equate them more to the ambulance chaser than to a professional. I have no doubt that if I followed your advice I’d make more money, but at the expense of who I am, at the expense of the dignity and respect of my profession, and at the expense of my self-respect. I may not be making a six figure income, but I make a good living and I’ve done it without prostituting myself or my profession. In fact, I believe that if you and the others like you who are advocating financial planners become common salespeople would cease with your self serving attempt to sell your services, I’d be making considerably more because my expertise would come to the surface. As it is with the advice and guidance you and others give on how to market, many of the best financial planners aren’t acquiring the clients we deserve because lesser skilled planners are attracting them through their marketing practices.”

The reader had a few other comments to make, but you get the general drift of his email. Unfortunately, my experience working with thousands of advisors in the financial services industry is that he is not the only one with this view of marketing and sales.

Like most sales trainers, I get a good number of very positive emails and my share of challenging emails, but I’m not sure I get any more honest than this one. This reader is very clear on how he sees himself and his profession—and how he sees salespeople, marketing, and other financial planners who are aggressive in developing their practices.

He is also very clear on his misunderstanding of what sales and marketing is about and how business is acquired. Unfortunately, being one of the best at what you do isn’t going to bring in business. If no one knows about you, then no matter how good you are at what you do, you’re not going to thrive.

There isn’t a dichotomy between selling and marketing and being a professional, one doesn’t exclude the other. Creating an expert image through ethically sound marketing isn’t degrading or deceptive.

However, the arrogance and ignorance to believe that one is above selling and marketing is self-destructive. Being jealous of one’s competition because they are acquiring clientele you don’t think they deserve is self-destructive. Believing you warrant more business simply because you know what you’re doing is self-destructive.

Being technically competent or even being a technical expert is useless if you don’t have clients to practice on. Spending time and energy and using the strategies that create your public image and reputation as an expert is the sign of a true expert; believing you are above marketing is an indication of a lack of understanding of what marketing is and how business works.

Public reputations don’t happen by accident. They have to be nurtured and cultivated. They have to be created.

How many great financial planners are languishing in near poverty because no one knows they exist? If simply being great at what one does was enough, there would be no need for marketing, advertising, and selling. If being good was good enough, there wouldn’t be so many highly proficient technicians in every industry going out of business everyday because they are starving to death.

Success doesn’t happen because one happens to be a highly skilled technician. Success requires the acquisition of a number of skills—from the technical skills of your profession to the skills to get the word out about your existence and how you can serve the potential client. Success happens by intention, not by happenstance. Image doesn’t mean illusion and substance doesn’t mean success. Technical substance must be combined with a public image created through marketing and solidified through selling if you want to create a practice that is both professionally and financially satisfying.

April 4, 2008

Projecting an Expert Image

Filed under: Personal Marketing, Referral Selling, career development, developing expert reputation, marketing, prospecting, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 6:13 am
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Virtually every salesperson with any experience what so ever proclaims him or herself to be an expert in their field.  Their business card, their fliers, their door hangers (if they use them), their cold calling spiel, their brochures, and everything else they have tries to communicate this expert status to prospects and clients.

Why is everyone so anxious to get the word out that they are experts and their competitors aren’t?

Simply because they recognize that prospects want to work with people who know and understand their needs.  They want to work with people who are fully up-to-date on the best ways to solve the prospect’s problems.  They want to work with people who know how to get problems solved in the most effective, cost efficient and advantageous manner possible.  They want the best advice and best solutions in the marketplace.  In other words, they want to work with an expert and most are willing to pay expert prices to work with a true expert.

Yet, knowing this, most salespeople seek to attract new prospects by using methods that shout as loudly as possible that they aren’t experts.  Prospects and clients make some assumptions about salespeople.  Some of their assumptions are accurate, some not.  Nevertheless, whether they are accurate or not, we must deal with their assumptions as they are, not as we wish they were.

Prospects have very definite assumptions about how real experts find new business.

Prospects and clients assume that those salespeople who are cold calling, who are plastering the neighborhood with fliers or door hangers, who are burning the fax machine up with fliers, sticking cheap signs on the street corner, and who are canvassing door-to-door aren’t experts.  They aren’t experts by definition because in the eyes of prospects they aren’t working the way an expert works.  Most prospects, individuals and businesses, believe that true experts generate their business in far more sophisticated ways than cold calling and killing massive numbers of trees for useless fliers.

And they’re right.  The top producers don’t use those methods as their primary methods of finding and connecting with potential clients.  They do use more sophisticated methods.

And they’re wrong.  Those same top producers do use cold calling, they do use strategically faxed fliers, and they do on occasion drop-by on a cold walk-in on an identified quality prospect.  They just don’t do it the same way most salespeople do.  They have learned to turn “lower class” prospecting methods into sophisticated prospecting methods.  And their version of those methods work.

If you want to portray yourself as being an expert, you must begin weaning yourself from the average Joe marketing methods and learn the techniques and strategies of the experts.

It isn’t simply a matter that the more sophisticated methods of prospecting and marketing are more enjoyable or that they produce better results.  It’s more serious than that.  Learning to get referrals the way the mega-producers do, and to network the way they do, and to cold call the way they do, and to do the other things they do is crucial to moving away from being just another salesperson.  If your prospect views you as just another run of the mill salesperson, why should they use you if you don’t have the absolute best price in the market?

Being an expert is as much about how you’re perceived as what you know.  You may be the greatest financial planner or Realtor the world has known or network engineer the world has ever seen, but if you’re cold calling prospects, you’re just another tele-marketer.  There’s nothing wrong with that–if that’s what you want to be.

February 1, 2008

Low Cost, High Impact Positioning Sets You Apart From Your Competition

Filed under: Personal Marketing, developing expert reputation, marketing, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 8:30 am
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Would you like to have the power and the authority of the press proclaim you as the leading personal financial planning, architect, environmental engineer, or IT consulting expert in your local area?  Who wouldn’t?  Having the newspaper, radio or TV news, or a local magazine inform their readers or listeners that you are the authority in your industry is worth more to your business than any amount of advertising you could ever purchase. 

Salespeople, professionals and business owners try to find the most effective methods of finding and influencing prospects.  Yet, the reality is that most are using the same methods, with the same message as their competition.  Differentiation is the objective of every marketer–whether the marketing director of a financial services company or the owner of a small consulting company.

Everyone is fighting to set themselves apart from the crowd.  Unfortunately, being seen as unique or different is extremely difficult.  For the past few decades, everyone has been encouraged to develop their own Unique Selling Proposition–a short phrase that succinctly describes what they do and what sets them apart, not what they sell.  The problem is that every other competitior has their own version of the same USP.  The USP is effectively dead, not because it didn’t produce results, but because it is no longer unique.

Most rely exclusively on massive advertising, direct mail, cold calling, or other forms of marketing.  Although marketing is a key to success, prospects are still wary of it.  They are fully aware they are being sold, and many assume, being manipulated in some form.  In addition, marketing doesn’t give ample opportunity to differentiate.  Seldom will you find an ad, a direct mail piece, a cold call approach, or other marketing that effectively sets one salesperson or company apart from their competition.

Nevertheless, there are ways to stand far above the crowd.  You can outdistance your competition–not by outspending them on advertising, out cold calling them, or out pricing them.  Outdistancing your competition, involves out positioning them in the marketplace by making yourself the sought after advisor because of your perceived expertise.  And best of all, your program to out position the competition costs little to nothing.

Pick up your local newspaper or business magazine and you’ll notice almost every article has quotes by people within the industry the reporter is discussing.  A few articles have extensive interviews with “leaders” within that industry.  These individuals are quoted and interviewed as the experts within the industry.

Nothing you can do can give you the expert image and the authority that being quoted or interviewed in the news media can provide.  Your marketing is recognized by prospects and clients as marketing.  They understand you’re trying to sell something.  Publishing articles and giving speeches, although far more influential than “marketing,” is still viewed by prospects as a subtle attempt at positioning yourself.  However, when quoted and interviewed by the news media, all suspicion and questioning of your agenda disappears.  You’ve gone from marketer or quasi-marketer to unadulterated expert.

Despite the current consumer cynicism about bias in the press, business news is still viewed as unbiased.  Only the experts within the subject industry are quoted and interviewed.  A knowledgeable person can disagree with the expert, but the person quoted is still viewed as an expert.

You simply cannot buy that kind of exposure.  In reputable news publications, that type of coverage simply isn’t for sale. 

Nevertheless, you can earn it.  The individuals quoted and interviewed didn’t just get lucky.  They worked hard to get the exposure by developing a relationship with the reporter or freelance writer.  They developed the contacts over time.  You can do the same.

The fact of the matter is most of the individuals quoted are not the innovators in their industry, nor are they necessarily the absolute best at what they do.  They are, however, the ones who have made it part of their marketing plan to become the recognized local expert.  They have worked to get the quotes and the interviews.

How can you do the same?  You do it by instituting a plan of action that gradually leads to being recognized as the authority.  Although it takes time, you can have established your reputation and begin seeing results within as little as a year.

Get Expert Credibility:  Begin writing and publishing articles and giving speeches.  You need to give reporters and freelance writers something they recognize as being from an expert.  A list of articles you have published, along with the names of the publications, and the speeches you have given is the basis for this recognition. 

Get Noticed:  Create a media kit and get it in the hands of anyone in the news media who might be interested in and cover your industry.  A basic media kit need only have a one-page biography, a reproducible photograph, a list of articles published and speeches given, one or two samples of published articles, and a list of the topics that the reporter can rely on you for comment, interviews, and information.  Send a hardcopy or electronic kit to every reporter, freelance writer, and editor that may have reason to cover any aspect of the industry.

Get Connected:  Follow-up with each reporter, freelancer, and editor to make sure they received your kit and see if they have any questions or current information needs.  Let them know you are highly accessible.  Many will be working on very tight deadlines and will need access to you on very short notice.  Give them a cell number where you can be reached virtually anytime, day or night.

Keep Them Updated:  During your initial conversation, ask for their permission to keep them informed of your activities.  Then keep them informed by sending them updates to your article and speech lists, important press releases about yourself and your business–and especially anything occurring in the industry or the economy that should be of interest to them.  Become their eyes and ears.

Marketing is more than simply putting an ad in the paper, sending a direct mail piece, or writing a quality cold calling script.  Marketing is developing and implementing a plan to out-maneuver your competition.  You may not be able to outspend your competition.  You may not be able to or want to out price them.  However, you can out “expert” them.  And, by the way, not only does becoming the recognized expert push aside your competition, it can virtually eliminate cost as an issue.

January 28, 2008

Are You Missing this Most Underutilized and Effective Marketing Format?

Filed under: Niche Marketing, Personal Marketing, developing expert reputation, marketing, sales, selling — Paul McCord @ 6:41 am
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Salespeople and business owners often overlook one of the most effective and quick ways to both establish themselves as experts in their field and generate a pipeline of quality prospects.

Most salespeople and small business owners are all too familiar with cold-calling; purchasing leads; sending out mass direct mail and email pieces; and using print, radio and TV advertising and other common methods of lead generation.  However, becoming a niche expert and taking that expertise on the road in the form of speaking to groups and organizations that cater to their prospects is seldom considered.

The natural fear of public speaking is a deterrent for many, but most salespeople simply have not considered the possibility.  When we think of a speaker, most of us envision someone with grand ideas speaking to the most crucial events of the day—or maybe someone who has lead an extraordinary life, regaling the audience with tales of high adventure.  If we do think of business experts as speakers, we tend to think of names such as Jack Welch, Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar or some other high-profile guru who commands tens of thousands of dollars per appearance.

Those sorts of people may be the most visible, but they are, in fact, the tiny minority of speakers.  Literally tens of thousands of organizations in the US need speakers on a regular weekly or monthly basis.  A large percentage of these organizations are actively looking for businesspeople that have a message that will appeal to the majority of their members—and you could be that speaker.

You need not be expounding on the evils of the Democratic takeover of Congress, or the how badly the Republicans have governed, or the great coming economic downfall of civilization as we know it.  You do not have to be a stand-up comedian or a storyteller on the level of Garrison Keillor.

Speaking for local groups and originations only requires you to have information that is relevant and interesting. 

A realtor client of mine became an expert in the minutiae of every neighborhood in her city and began speaking to groups about the transitions taking place in the city—which neighborhoods are on the verge of taking off, and which in decline.  Her presentation is laced with statistics but also stories and history, with fact and prediction. Within a matter of several months, she became the “go to” person when members of audiences she had spoken to began to think about buying or selling their home, because she is recognized as the expert on where to move, where to build and where to avoid.

Another client of mine, a business insurance broker, began speaking about the issues that businesses in his city face in terms of risk.  His presentation centers on crime, employee theft, and upcoming city ordinances that may affect business, and other, unexciting aspects of risk management.

Although he is a likable and entertaining man, his presentation is hardly worthy of an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.  Nevertheless, he has information that is of interest to other businesspeople.  Moreover, he, like the realtor, has become known as expert in his field.  Businesspeople come to him first because of their perception of his extraordinary knowledge of both business risk and how to manage it and the local issues facing businesses.

Neither of these people is exceptional in the sense that they have led extraordinary lives or have mythical business prowess.  In fact, the business agent has only been in the insurance business for a couple of years.  However, both recognized the power of getting in front of groups and presenting themselves as experts.  Their average audience is fewer than 40 people.  Their average talk is less than 20 minutes, and each speaks less than four times a month.  Nevertheless, if they speak three times per month to an average audience of 35 people, they are in front of about 1,200 per year as “the” expert in their field.  Moreover, many of these people are potential prospects.

How do you become the expert?  First, find something about your business that will be of interest to a broad range of potential customers.  Concentrate on areas that could give your audience information on potential risks or opportunities that could expand or enhance their life, open new doors, or increase or protect their wealth.  Once you have found an interesting niche, connect it to your local market.  The realtor deals only with local issues and demographics, but the insurance broker mixes general risk statistics with local business-related issues.  He takes mundane national statistics and brings them home, to a more personal level.

Do your homework on both your subject and your public-speaking skills.  Hone your presentation so that you are confident and do not have to speak with notes.  Work in front of a mirror until you have managed to eliminate all of your nervous movement.  Go over your presentation—both verbally in front of a mirror and in your mind as you drive—until it becomes second nature.  Check and recheck facts and figures.  And, join the Toastmasters.  Most of us probably think of the Toastmasters as simply an organization that will improve our public speaking skills.  It certainly will.  However, it will improve your leadership skills also, not to mention your interpersonal skills in general.  Most every community has at least one Toastmasters club within reasonable distance.  In addition, in a city of any reasonable size, you’ll probably have several options of meeting days and times as there will probably be several clubs from which to choose.

Then, once you have mastery over your subject and yourself, get the word out to groups, associations and organizations where you can get in front of potential prospects.  Send a self-promotion package and follow up with a phone call.  As you begin to set speaking engagements, more will follow.

Keep your material fresh and up-to-date.  Look and act like a professional.  Within months, you’ll have gained the reputation of an expert, the image of the guru, and the self-confidence to match.
Speaking to relevant groups can literally change your business.  Over time, you can create a steady flow of prospects coming to your door seeking your expertise and guidance.  Getting in front of real prospects is key to success.  Getting in front of them as the recognized expert puts you on a different level from your competition.  Far more effective than cold calling, direct mail or advertising, speaking gives you the opportunity to connect, to educate, and to impress your prospects in a format that simply doesn’t exist elsewhere. 

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