More Meetings = More Clients4 min read
What is the purpose of marketing? It’s to attract new business, right?
Well, not if you’re a B2B Professional.
The purpose of B2B marketing is to get meetings with prospective clients.
What’s the difference and what does that mean for your marketing?
Well, just think about how prospective clients turn into paying clients.
Let’s say you’re a manager who’s looking for somebody to help their team work more productively and creatively.
Do they look up productivity consultants on Google, find a web product page about “Productivity and Creative Services for Businesses” and then click on the buy button?
Wouldn’t that be nice!
But it doesn’t happen. Yet so many B2B service pages are written as if that’s how they expect their web visitor to respond:
“Oh, wow, this sounds like the perfect service. I’ll call them up right now and hire them for this project.”
Not gonna happen.
What happens instead?
Well, the business manager, asks others in their company, “Hey, do you know somebody good who does productivity and creativity consulting for teams?”
And if they find somebody who knows someone like that, the manager asks them a bunch of questions. “What exactly did they do? Did their work make a difference? Were you satisfied with the results?”
And if the answers were positive, then they look up the web page and learn more about what the consultant does. Ultimately, they call the consultant and have an initial conversation.
“So, Robert, are you telling me that most of my marketing efforts are a waste of time because most business comes from word-of-mouth anyway?”
Well, yes a whole lot of it. All those posts on social media, endless content marketing, and videos all over YouTube, for the most part, don’t work very well for B2B professionals.
They rarely get qualified prospects calling you interested in working with you. And, yes, there are exceptions.
The message I’m working to get across these days takes a very different approach.
Whatever your marketing activity is — networking, speaking, webinars, your primary purpose is to generate enough of the know-like trust factor that those you connect with will be willing to have a conversation with you. And you do that by meeting more people and getting to know them.
And it seems that this is the very last thing anybody thinks of or tries.
When I got my first clients in San Francisco, where I started my business, I sent out letters to members of the SF Chamber of Commerce and then followed up by phone for meetings. And I got several new clients that way.
Then I did a lot of speaking to professional groups and collected business cards at the end of the talks. I followed up with all of them by phone or email and got conversations. Those conversations turned into new clients.
And after I’d developed a big email list, I promoted my individual and group coaching programs and invited those who were interested in knowing more to have a conversation with me. Again, new clients were the result.
Sure, I sold manuals and other low-cost programs via email and a buy-link on my website. But whenever I offered a program that cost more than a thousand dollars, I always set up a meeting to learn about the prospective client’s needs and answered their questions about the program.
Which takes us back to the beginning of this article. The purpose of marketing is to get meetings with prospective clients.
If you understand and buy into that concept, it can dramatically change your whole marketing mindset.
Instead of devising fancy strategies that try to directly attract new clients (or worse, waiting for the phone to ring), simply work out how to get more meetings with whatever marketing strategy you use.
And although this isn’t very hard, it can be tricky, and a whole lot of B2B professionals don’t know how to make it work for them.
Tomorrow, you’ll receive an invitation to a “marketing demo” to show you how easy it can be to get meetings with prospective clients and those who can lead you to prospective clients.
My purpose is to show to you that getting more meetings and converting them into great paying clients can be easier than you think.
Cheers, Robert
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