At a recent meeting, the marketing manager for a new start-up marketing services company asked me for advice on how to put together a winning new business program. As he described the exciting new technology and services they had developed, his question "what's the best way to reach out to new prospects?" reminded me that too often we look for the executional solution and forget that a sound, basic strategy must be in place before we make that first outbound call.
So here are four basic steps that every services marketer should take when planning your business development program.
Step One: Narrow your focus to the most important and most unique service(s) you provide. In today's overcrowded world of service marketers, the key to success for a small company is to be a specialist, not a generalist. I have worked with a lot of ad agencies and marketing services companies who offer a variety of services, but the ones that have been most successful have focused on the one or two services that give them a point of difference. If there is an area in which you truly excel, that's where you need to start when developing your new business outreach plan.
Too many service providers fall into the trap of saying that they don't want to miss an opportunity, so they tout every service offering to make sure they don't miss anyone. The problem with this approach is that you are competing with all of the other full-service, or multi-service providers, and unwittingly defining yourself as a commodity, not a premium product. If you are the same as a group of other companies, then the decision may boil down to who's the cheapest/fastest/easiest choice, not who is the best choice.
Step Two: Pinpoint your target prospects as tightly as possible. When you narrow your focus, you will most likely narrow your prospect list, but that can be a good thing. If the service in which you excel is truly important to a company, they will be more likely to listen to your message. And that increases your potential for a faster ROI on your marketing efforts.
Knowing your primary target group isn't rocket science, it's basic marketing. But as noted in Step One, too many service companies try to be all things to all people and end up wasting a lot of time, effort and money chasing too many prospects. A better strategy is to build a pyramid of target groups with the tip of the pyramid defined as a very small group who really want and need your service. And that's the first group to start with in your business development efforts.
When I work with an established company, my first recommendation is to carefully examine your current (or past) clients to determine why they hired you. Was there one particular service area in which you stood head and shoulders above your competition? If you don't know, ask; you might be surprised at the answer you get.
Step Three: Understand and promote the derived benefit your service offers. Several years ago, a colleague and I developed a systematic approach to strategy development that we called "The Derived Benefit Copy Model". Our hypothesis was that most companies talk about who they are and what they do, but they neglect to clearly articulate what that means to the customer . . . why should they care?
If you want your company to stand out in the prospect's mind, you need to identify and feature benefits, not attributes in external communications. And I don't mean just the rational benefits, but the derived emotional benefits as well.
In the aforementioned "copy model", we placed a special emphasis on the importance of understanding the emotional benefit that derives from a purchase decision. We used automobile marketing as a great example of the emotional basis for purchase decisions. Why does someone buy a Mercedes when a Hyundai performs equally well? The same question can be asked about people who buy a Mac instead of a PC? Or choose Nike over Avia or Brooks? There is an emotional reward to that purchase decision that transcends the attributes of the product.
The same thinking should be used when developing your outbound marketing copy strategy. Is there an emotional benefit to my service that can be capitalized upon? Can I structure my "brand promise" to differentiate my services from other similar companies by offering something beyond the physical performance of my service?
Step Four: Look for ways to give your prospect "permission to believe" your company is the right choice. There are two major factors at work here that should be noted. First, the pressure on marketers to avoid mistakes has never been greater. A recent Forrester study concluded that the average tenure of a CMO is less than three years. Too often this leads to a safe decision that can be defended to management. And one way to make your company a safe choice is to give your prospect a rock-solid conviction that your company is the right choice to make.
The second factor that must be considered is that marketers have an inherent mistrust of agencies. Let's face it. Agencies have a bad, but somewhat deserved, reputation for overpromising and underdelivering, and for basing recommendations on factors that were not necessarily in the best interests of their client. For years, the prevailing compensation system led too many agencies to recommend commissionable media buys over "below the line" alternatives that might have worked just as well to grow the client's business.
That's why the most critical factor in the decision process is to provide the prospect "permission to believe" that your company and service(s) is the right choice to make.
"Permission to believe" can be gained in several ways -- category experience, expertise in a particular medium, successful marketing to a specific target audience, are just a few of the ways to reassure a prospect that you can help them grow their business.
Over the past year, social media and SEO have been the hottest topics (and biggest needs) in the marketing community. Specialty service providers who understand the nuances and pitfalls of the digital space have been a strong growth area, but without "permission to believe" they can truly help a client, they face the same uphill battle as more traditional service suppliers.
How to gain "permission to believe" is an important topic that will be explored in future posts. The most important thing you should remember from this discussion is to really think through the strategic basics if you want to have a successful new business program.
