Allow Your Clients to Market You
I keep explaining to people that they shouldn’t fear competition, because competition opens markets. Burger King builds stores across the street from McDonals’s because they know people are going there to buy burgers. Walk down the street on Van Ness in San Francisco and you’ll find 40 auto dealerships, elbow-to-elbow.
So there are hundreds of books on sales tactics, and you might never make a sales call again if you tried to read them all in one lifetime. So let me save you the trouble in this age of No Normal®.
Sales today are based on evangelism, that is, the spreading of “the word” from peer to peer. It’s no longer “feet on the street” or advertising with celebrities. The notion of “influencers” on social media is all about evangelism. Buyers want to hear from someone like them, not Matthew McConaughey, who’s being paid a fortune to hawk a Lincoln he’d never choose to drive himself, and everybody knows it.
Our buyers are the same: The ask for peer referrals. This is the equivalent of your asking a trusted colleague for a good realtor, or pediatrician, or designer, or electrician—or consultant. We don’t troll the internet (remember the old “Yellow Pages” of the phone book??). We ask people we trust and to whom we can relate.
Hence, stop reading sales books (especially from people who just write books and can’t, themselves sell!) and start using your own buyers to spread the word to prospects. Therefore, my prime directive to you for rapid and high quality sales: Bring your clients together with those prospects who are their peers, either in person or remotely. Allow you clients to market you.
