Give Them a Taste

When you start marketing, every prospect is a Stranger.

Your first marketing task is to create Affiliations with Strangers through groups and associations. Your next job is to get their Attention through a focused marketing message. Then you need to develop Familiarity with your prospects so they feel comfortable with you. And the next-to-last step is providing Information that educates your prospects about what you do and how you can help them.

The purpose of all these marketing activities is to get prospects up to "Second Base," where they are ready to meet with you and explore doing business with you. Often just getting them to Familiarity or Information is enough. But not always.

Giving prospects more of an Experience or taste of what you do and what it means to them is often necessary. With this Experience, a prospect is often ready to take the next step and engage in the selling process.

It's important to realize that a prospect doesn't usually get very interested, let alone excited, about using your services, until they have a deeper sense of who you are and what you can do for them. Giving them an Experience accomplishes this.

What kind of Experience am I talking about?

A live presentation, an executive briefing, a telephone consultation, a teleclass, a video, or an audio recording are all effective mediums for providing this Experience.

The Experience step provides that last missing piece between Information and Second Base. And one reason is because it gives more of an emotional connection between you and your prospect.

Note that most of these Experience-oriented marketing activities are interactive, not static. They are deeper and less superficial; they are dynamic, not one-dimensional. When a prospect has an authentic Experience of you, they are drawn towards you. They are more willing to take the next step.

In many cases, you need to create a multi-step marketing process that includes all the steps above, culminating in an Experience-based marketing activity. And then you simply follow-up with those who show interest in taking the next step.

In other cases, you already have many prospects who are further along the process, such as long-term prospects, past and existing clients. For these, you can create an Experience-based marketing activity and get results almost immediately.

In the first situation, a scenario might go something like this: Meet through networking, discuss your business, connect regularly, provide information, add to your mailing list, send an invite to a presentation or teleclass.

In the second situation, all you need to do is send the invitation to prospects who are already at the Information step. Over the years, I've seen this work amazingly well.

Two clients I worked with were introducing new services.

For the first, we put together an introductory workshop in their conference room. They mailed an invite and did follow-up calls. They filled two events in a matter of days and converted many attendees into clients for the new service.

The second client, an established management consultant, had been certified in a new program. Simply by calling past clients and meeting with them to introduce this service, he had more business than he could handle in a just few weeks.

The mistake I see all too often is that we get prospects up to Information, put them on an eZine or newsletter list and then wait for them to call us. Great if they do, but by adding that Experience step, you can convert a larger percentage of prospects into clients much faster.

I've been doing this for years - even before the Internet.

I developed a list of Independent Professionals through my contacts with the Chamber of Commerce and other networking. I mailed a newsletter twice monthly and sent monthly postcards inviting people to introductory events. Those who attended were the ones I followed up with and turned into clients.

I've simply expanded my reach with email and this eZine. I now offer one or two teleclasses a month to those who already have Information and are ready for an Experience. Those who attend are the ones who purchase my products and programs.

As they say, it's not rocket science!

Are you stopping your marketing before you get to the Experience step? Big mistake. Build the Experience step into all your marketing and I predict you will attract more clients with a lot less effort.

The More Clients Bottom Line: To get the best results from marketing, you need to follow a process that moves prospects from Stranger to Experience. If you adhere to this path faithfully, you'll find marketing easier and whole lot more productive.

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