Get more sales in this old-fashioned way
Dateline: Boston, Massachusetts: I’m here in Boston to speak for Harvard Business School tonight. This is going to be a very good opportunity for me as a professional speaker. I love being in a place where you see real, live people and connect in a a “shake their hands and be there” kind of way.
Yes, it is very good to connect with people and part of relationship marketing is connecting on a variety of levels, many of them digital. Like you, I use email, texting, Facebook messages, Twitter, Linkedin and many other tools to connect with people. Relationship marketing means that you are, well, building relationships in the midst of everything you’re doing.
Sometimes the digital approach is really the best. Sometimes a quick text message that you’re running late and should be at the meeting in 15 minutes is ideal. You don’t need a long phone conversation for that. You don’t need to write a lengthy letter. Text is perfect in such a situation.
There are many cases where digital is best. However, we still need that human-to-human connection. That is something I’m looking forward to tonight as I speak to graduate students who are looking into ways they can be better presenters. This will be good in that HBS is known for its highly-interactive classes where grades are determined, at least in a large part, on class participation. I’m thinking we’ll have lots of extemporaneous Q&A and probing into how one can speak better when making a sales offer, presenting to potential investors and/or presenting to colleagues to get your point across.
In a world where everyone is doing a similar type of marketing tactic, you want to do something different that stands out in a favorable way. I remember what Dr. Thomas Stanley (author of The Millionaire Next Door) would tell us when I had him for my MBA marketing classes years ago.http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/growth-strategies/2014/04/4-key-business-lessons-i-learned-from-my-professor.html He would tell us that we need to find out what others are doing, and then do something different to get attention. This is vitally important today.
Find ways to connect with people by being there and you can get more sales in this old-fashioned way. When you are the one that drove across town to see someone and they know it took you extra TME (Time, Money, Energy) to be there, that moves you up the “this person is doing it right’ scale. When the numbers makes sense, it is sometimes best to hop on an airplane and physically be there for the meeting.
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