As it turns out, you’ve been right all along.
It is all about you.
If you are a provider of a professional-grade service, you are vital to the success of your promotion and sales efforts – often far more than the feature list of your services.
To explain what I mean, let’s try a scenario:
You are in a competitive sales situation. You can be the person selling the service with a long feature list, or you can be the salesperson the prospect trusts and respects more. You choose.
Exactly.
You see this every day. What would your clients say if I asked them why they work with you?
Would they say that you offered integrated solutions and success strategies to meet their operational challenges in a dynamic world?”…Or would they say that you are pleasant to work with, understand their needs, and they can depend on you to get a mission-critical job done well?
In other words, they see you as a “real person” whom they feel they can trust as a partner. So why is it that these traits are the last things we reveal in our promotional materials?
The paradox in service-firm communication is this: If you stop trying to explain what you do and be personable, engaging, and knowledgeable about the market, you will communicate your value with far more competitive impact.
Service lists aren’t everything. You can compete effectively by being a professional that connects to the needs and motivations of your prospects.
Review your current communications for how effectively you present yourself and your team as professionals that can be counted on as colleagues and allies. If that dimension is missing, this factor alone could account for an underperforming lead generation program.
People choose people they trust and with whom they want to work.
