When it comes to setting traps to win new customers…be sure to snare with flair!

When you think about it, aiming to attract new customers is very much like setting a trap for a mouse or a larger creature. The difference of course is that our trap should be a positive one, offering help, not harm…however the bait we use must be as enticing to a prospect as cheese is to a rodent. We can use the word bait to mean ‘business and individual temptations’, because a prospect will only step into the trap if he feels that his business will benefit and he will too…concerning personal success.

Too many organizations use bait that fails to attract good prospects, most often because they dish up what appears to be boring and indulgent talk about their products and service! Any reference to product will see to it that very few people respond, and so it is critical to feature information that offers topical ideas on business growth…presented by someone that has the credentials to deliver such a message. I am often asked by companies to speak at conferences that they help to sponsor, simply because they know that a professional presentation on business development is preferable to executives ‘trying’ to motivate and entertain a large audience. The Belkin Company did this at a Harvey Norman conference, when the then CEO spoke briefly and then introduced me to talk about ‘the art of creating sales’. The hour session went so well that Belkin were delighted to receive the top supplier award for their contribution to the conference.

When I was marketing and sales director for Schwarzkopf, I invited the man who ran the most successful colour salon in the world to conduct seminars for our customers, to help them build sales of colour services. Because of the bait used, attendance was excellent and the customers loved the seminars, all of which led to more purchases of our colour products! Once, in aiming to attract new salon customers in NZ, I conducted 16 seminars in 10 days, with no mention of our products or service at all, focusing instead on ideas we could offer to help build salon sales.

I also discovered that our reps at Schwarzkopf were not setting any form of enticing trap when making regular sales calls on salons…which of course was my fault. We then made sure that on every call our reps would have one presentation item to cover that would be of great interest to the salon owners. They would start their call by briefly and partly showing the special item, saying ‘I have one main item to show you today that I am sure you will find to be very valuable, however before I do that let me go through the regular business with you.’ This approach was very enticing, allowing us to deal with the bulk of the sales call with the stated promise of building up to something new, different and significant…designed to create mutual sales growth.

At a different level, I recall working with the Unisys organization in Melbourne and they wanted to ‘get closer’ to 70 or so prime prospects. We put together a 60 minute seminar that featured two elements: a 45 minute presentation from me to IT chiefs about making their business units more valuable, and an orchestrated, brief message from one of the Unisys managers about a new concept they were offering…minus reference to the product behind the concept. We promoted the event as a business-building meeting and attracted about 50 executives. Everything went very well and at the end we received the two comments that a successful presentation should always attract, from more than 90% of the attendees. The comments were ‘will you let me know when you are running another meeting like this please?’, and ‘can I arrange to see someone to discuss the concept that was presented?’

Dynamite without a detonating device is harmless, as is a trap without effective bait. That said, in business there is no point gaining market attention if when they turn your way…you then turn them off by talking about products they already know about and possess! A friend of mine once received a flyer in the mail advertising a book, and the ad was so good he bought the book, but it was an awful read. He then wrote to the publisher suggesting that they arrange for the guy who wrote the flyer…to write a book!