Promise Marketing Blog

Most professional service firms complain that they have many clients who could use other services their firm provides, but they just can’t seem to cross-sell these services. There are three reasons for this challenge:

• Your service providers are mistakenly thinking that their clients understands the wide range of services provided by your firm. In most cases, this simply isn’t true. When clients think of the services your firm provides, they think of the services THEY receive and nothing else. Clients have their own problems, they don’t sit around all day thinking about you. You need to remind them of everything you know how to do and uncover their problems before they engage someone else to solve them.
• As service providers, you get wrapped up in solving the problems your clients have presented to you, then moving on. Unfortunately for service providers, your clients won’t face every problem at the same time. So cross selling isn’t a same-time sale. It’s not like the fast food worker asking you if you want fries with your meal. It’s more like the waiter at a fancy restaurant checking on you after dessert to see if you’d like an after dinner drink. You need to keep in touch with your clients long after your services have been rendered in order to sell them something else.
• The originating service provider can’t explain the other services offered by your firm, or doesn’t understand how to recognize the cross selling opportunity. Just like clients think about your firm as doing for everyone what you do for THEM, service providers think about clients needing what they know how to provide. Without a good understanding of what your own firm can do, you can’t see these opportunities.

The solution to these problems is content marketing. By sharing information about other services your firm provides, your clients will be exposed to these services. Your clients will recognize themselves in your case studies, blog posts, and newsletter articles. If you read your own firm’s case studies, blog posts, and newsletter articles, you will learn more about how to describe these services in plain English. That way, when your clients ask you about what they have read, you will be able to answer the question, or at least direct them to the author of the article.

The trick with all of this is to be deliberate and consistent. Without a communications plan tied to your organization’s goals, you’re just talking to make noise. Think about how your firm wants to grow and build your content marketing plan to match these goals. This will tell you what to write about and where to publish the information. Then, force yourself to be consistent. People need to hear messages more than once before they sink in. But with time, a well-planned content marketing strategy can help your firm cross sell without turning your service providers into “salespeople.”

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Two of my favorite bloggers, Michael Gass and Chris Brogan wrote blog posts prompted by a blog post from Jason Falls. (Can you follow that? It almost sounds like a middle school chain of gossip. But it’s not.) All three posts make great points about corporate blogging in general.  It seems that many corporations are investing less time in their blogs and many agencies are following suit, saying they are too much work for too little results.

Well duh! Most agency blogs aren’t all that great. Both Gass and Brogan point out that most blogs have no strategy behind them and that nobody likes to read self-serving posts. We agree. We also think that agencies generally have horrible websites too. I think it’s because as creative people our own websites are a great place to turn the creative faucet all the way to high. This sometimes leads to beautiful, oddly-functioning, hard to navigate websites. Also, agencies often flock to the latest, newest, shiniest tool and get bored quickly with “old” (as in 6 months old) stuff.

We continue to advise our clients to blog and to (gasp!) publish e-newsletters. They work. But you have to be willing to share what you know. Remember, you can talk all day about what you know and a good prospect will recognize that it’s better to pay for your expertise than to try to figure out how to do something for themselves. If they’re a DIY kind of business, they’re not a great client anyway. At least not yet.

Don’t give up on blogs. They’re great for SEO. They’re great for forcing yourself to read and write on a regular basis. They demonstrate expertise. And they do work!

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Last week, I made a series of presentations at the Salvation Army Divisional Conference on community relations. You can review the presentation below.

One of the main points I tried to stress throughout my presentation is that community relations, public relations, and social media are completely intertwined. The use of social media has greatly affected the traditional media world. Social media has opened many doors and closed others. It has fragmented our distribution system for messages. It makes it easier to reach everybody, and nobody. It has also changed our expectations for communication.

But traditional media has not gone away. Sure, it has adapted. Newspapers may be smaller, but people still read them. So, unlike the social media guru in the next room who was completely discounting traditional media, at Clear Verve we stress a planned, integrated approach. You can’t be everywhere all at once, but if you make a plan, taking into account your goals and the audience each outlet reaches, you can develop a process that will help you strategically reach out to the right people at the right time.

Don’t just do what’s cool or what you know. Do your research and to what’s RIGHT for you.

AMC’s new reality show The Pitch is a reality show about ad agencies competing for major accounts. Although it focuses on ad agencies, it shows one of the biggest challenges people who sell ideas face – how to get the client to understand what you can do for them without giving your ideas away.

We’re asked all the time to share our ideas when we meet with prospective clients and we hate doing it. It’s not because we want to charge for these ideas – although it is important to remember that we get paid to generate ideas – that’s how we make our living. And it’s not because we expect our clients to hire us blindly, we know they need to understand what we’re capable of. It’s because when we provide ideas without proper context, it’s really easy to provide bad ideas.

When you go to see your doctor, you don’t stand in front of him or her, fully clothed and ask, “Doc, what should I do to feel better?” Your doctor wouldn’t know what to say. He or she would probably be forced to come back with some general recommendations about taking vitamins, exercising, and eating right. He or she would never be able to treat your ongoing stomach pain without knowing about it.

That’s what happens to us. We can’t make accurate recommendations without learning about your organization. A five (or fifty) minute review of your website won’t cut it. We want to meet your employees, learn about what you’ve done in the past, examine your competition, talk about your goals, and figure out what will realistically fit into your budget.

In marketing, like in medicine, there is no magic bullet. Growing a service-based business (or any business for that matter) is hard work. Help us out. Let us learn about you. Tell us what you’re thinking about and what you want for your business’ future. Then, we might have some good ideas and we can work with you to make them happen.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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Recently, our good friend Alonzo Kelly wrote a great article about looking for leaders “on the perimeter.” He talked about how important it is for us to remember when we were all diamonds in the rough and not the polished, hard, and sometimes boring people we have become.

I loved this article and wanted to share it with you because I think that the same philosophy can be applied to marketing ideas. In order to stand out and be truly different from your competition, you have to get off the beaten path. You have to look beyond the easy solution to find what is really different and what will really work. I recently gave presentations at both Marquette Law School and MATC to college students who are thinking of starting their own businesses. In these presentations, I pointed out that one of the most common mistakes business owners make is marketing by imitation. If you find yourself making marketing decsions by saying, “What would so and so do?” you’re guilty of this problem.

Of course, getting off the beaten path can be scary. It means taking risks. It also means really delving into your business to see what is going on and thinking hard about where you want to go in the future. When I get scared about this, I remind myself of some of the best advice I was given back when I first started my career. I was a Manager Trainee at Kohl’s Department Stores, doing one of my first walk-throughs with my District Manager. If you’ve never had to do this, basically it involves walking your boss’ boss’ boss around your part of the store, telling him or her how everything in your area is doing and answering questions about how you plan to improve. As a totally inexperienced Trainee, I was doing a TERRIBLE job. Luckily, my District Manager was a mentor, not a killer. When I was done, he took me aside, told me how to do it next time, and then said, “And be sure to get off the aisles. If you don’t walk on the carpet, you’ll never see what’s really going on.”

Whether the innovation in your business is on the edges or buried deep in the middle of your company, don’t be afraid of it. If you want to stand out from the competition, you have to get off the beaten path.

Christina Steder is the President of Clear Verve Marketing and works with clients to plan, create and execute marketing campaigns. Follow her on Twitter as @clearverve.

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