New York Marketer

We interrupt this irregularly scheduled lack of programming

My book on marketing for law firms, coauthored with Carol Schiro Greenwald, is now available.   If you are an attorney or have no better use for $80 (hey, it was published by the Bar Association), you can find it here. 

Everybody loves a bargain, but...

I remember my grandparents grousing about having to buy new things.  For those of us who came of age after WWII, the orientation is more towards wanting to buy things.  We have grown accustomed to a ludicrous abundance of cheap goods and inexpensive services.  We ask "how much does it cost?" without considering what it will do to make things better for our business or personal lives in the long term.  A new book from Atlantic correspondent Ellen Ruppel Shell argues that cheap stuff usually costs more in the long term and there are many hidden costs we don’t take into account (also check out the review in Salon). 

If you’re marketing a professional service, chasing “right now” needs and wants or providing a “bargain” can often turn into an endless grind of transactional (or one-shot) sales.  You not only forgo the chance to build a relationship with clients, but you also spend more of your time and money to land each sale.  Sure, you have to innovate to meet changing needs, but you can’t afford the cost of being disposable – or dispensable.  One of my grandfathers always bought Kenmore appliances because he felt they delivered on their promises and offered the best value over time.  How do you frame your promises and offer value that builds that kind of loyalty?

 

The real meaning of strategic

Seth Godin has a very interesting piece today about what "pro-business" really means.  He looks at how, in the quest for short-term gains we so often end up with longer-term shortfalls. I particularly like his definition of "factory" as any business that focuses on doing what it did yesterday, but cheaper and faster.  Especially with the economy in the doldrums, that's an easy trap to fall into.  So I wonder, what can I do today that's profoundly different from what I did yesterday?  How can I invite my clients to stop focusing on the immediate cost and look at the eventual value?  What am I doing to leave things better than they were when I found them?  Finally, what's the most interesting problem I can solve today?

A First Foray into Multimedia

I've been speaking in public since I was about 14 years old, but for some reason I've always been skittish about doing a professional video of myself talking about a business topic.  The chaos of the times prompted me to get off the dime (actually it was a little more expensive than that -- but not too much) and do something.  Editing the 90 minute presentation down to 5 salient minutes was an adventure.  Here I am talking about marketing in tough times to a group of coaches at the Midtown Coaching Center.

Keeping it real - and personal

A good friend and colleague visited the blog and came back with an interesting question: why did I post my personal kayak experience? Then I realized that, in spite of what I wrote, my kayak post had a lot to do with marketing - and not just marketing the kayak companies I mentioned.

Very often when we are in "business" mode, we fail to show up. We have all developed public personas that let us hide behind what I like to call "the plexiglass screen of professionalism." The people on the other side of the screen can see and hear us in a slightly distorted way, but they cannot touch us and we cannot touch them. By putting more of ourselves out there, we make it easier for the people we want to be in touch with to actually reach us. This means sharing some things about passions and experiences that we have outside of the office, as well as being open about what excites us in the work that we do.

Have you ever noticed how hard it is to resist smiling when someone smiles at you? Or how it's nearly impossible not to have some kind of gut response when someone around you is excited? This can be annoying when we are being talked at, but it can be completely irresistible when we are being invited into a story and the person telling it has a deep connection to it. I've just started working with a new client who is in a field that could be very dry indeed - estate planning. We have been dancing around how to present what she does in a way that will turn people on. This is not an easy task, because in addition to being dry, her work centers on one thing none of us like to think about: death. But I got my client to start telling me about some of the people she had helped - and the transformation that had been wrought in the lives of several families. I have to confess that my eyes were not dry. Moved as I was by the stories, I was equally moved as I listened to this highly educated, polished professional start to show up in a fully genuine, open-hearted way. It was pretty amazing and I got a much better sense of how I could help my client market herself because I understood how her clients might connect with her.

If you're part of a professional service organization, your biggest differentiator is not your credentials or your chain of successes; it's the fact that nobody does what you do the way that you do it. So letting people see what moves you - even if it's a moonlight trip by kayak - serves only to give people a better sense of how you might do what you do. And that can be irresistible.