June 25, 2003

Attracting Prospects
by Kimberly Stevens kim@askthebizcoach.com

One of the most important things the owner of a service business can to is to learn how to enable prospects to experience the benefits of their service first-hand. Read that sentence again – it’s very important.

Just yesterday I went into a gourmet popcorn store and the owner offered me a sample of caramel popcorn. Mmm-mmm good. I bought a large. Book publishers let you read excerpts in magazines and online with hopes you’ll want to read more from the printed book. Custom pen distributors frequently send businesses a personalized pen engraved with their company name. Software developers encourage you to download a 30-day trial thinking that you will get hooked in that time and do anything to avoid losing access to it. But how do you and I let our prospects get a taste of what we have to offer?

It took me awhile, but in my web marketing business I finally hit upon something that really got my prospects’ attention. One of the paid services I offered was search engine optimization. This meant getting my clients’ web sites to appear really high in the search engine rankings for the keywords their target market was searching for. Every month I would send clients a report showing where their web site ranked for each of the keywords I had been hired to optimize for them. So, what better way to attract prospects than to send them an unsolicited report showing where their web site appeared in the rankings for keywords related to their industry.

These days almost everyone has heard that if your site appears in any ranking higher than 20, seekers are likely never going to see your web site listing. So you can imagine how my potential clients felt when they received an unsolicited report showing their web site was nowhere to be found on the 10 most popular search engines. In fact, thinking on it now, it would have been even better to include the names of the companies with the top 5 ranked sites. They would most likely have been recognizable competitors to my prospects and may have spurred even quicker action.

When we are thinking about our own businesses, it can sometimes be harder to identify the best way to enable a prospect sample our services. We tend to want to stick with those marketing methods we have tried before or those that feel the most comfortable, even if they aren’t very effective.

One of my friends owns a leadership development and team-building company that targets mid-sized corporations. She is an engaging and talented speaker. I’m convinced that the only thing she would need to do to book a new client every month is to get in front of several groups of her target market. By speaking on her topic to build credibility, I feel certain she would impress upon the audience members exactly what she could do for their employees and departments. But, instead, she has spent the last two years attending chamber of commerce networking events where I would almost guarantee that none of the companies fit her ideal client profile.

Fortunately for her, she has booked an adequate number of clients through contacts from her previous employer and from those she has received referrals because she is indeed good. But, because it is so difficult to understand exactly what she does until you see her in action, I’m sure a lot of people who just meet her at networking events aren’t convinced of her value. It leaves me wondering just how much more successful she would be if she let her target market see what she has to offer by setting a goal of speaking to four new groups of targeted prospects every month.