Get Personal About Your Marketing

Tony Alessandra, Ph.D.; www.alessandra.com

Tony Alessandra, the author of 27 books, including Collaborative Selling and The Platinum Rule for Sales Mastery, points to experienced salespeople as powerful role models for professionals selling their own services. He asserts,

The successful sales rep seems to just sit back and respond to calls. The orders roll in, and she seems to be getting rich without effort. What we generally don’t see are the years she spent building her network, and investing in her personal visibility.

This successful salesperson is using personal marketing. She’s marketing herself just as a company would market a product. Just as it takes time to build brand loyalty, it takes time and hard work for personal marketing to pay off, but it’s worth it in the long run. If your best potential clients have been made aware of you in advance of your contact with them, you’ll find it much easier to set up an appointment, establish a relationship, and consummate the sale.

Keep in mind that it’s better to work on getting multiple exposures to a smaller target group than to spread your effort and have fewer exposures to more people. Potential clients in your target market should be reading your articles, receiving mail from you, hearing you speak or give a seminar, bumping into you at a social function or trade show, and hearing about you and your expertise from their fellow association members and friends.

The reason it’s so important to invest your time in these methods is that the quality of an incoming lead is almost always better than the lead you get in a cold call. The prospect who calls you has already identified his need for your service, and he’s calling to get your help.

When you effectively use personal marketing, you’ll find that little by little, people will start to recognize your name, your company, your product, and your face. Pretty soon the phone will start to ring for you, and your image as an established expert will start to take hold.