Marketing Solutions for Highly Skilled Professionals

When I do an analysis of a company’s marketing and lead generation, the questions I ask are designed to get me closer to understanding the hot, beating heart of sales – who is your audience and how do they feel?

Some business owners have more information about this than others. While most owners have great instincts about their audience, they often struggle to articulate what information they have and how they’re using it. 

This can cause problems with lead generation and closing rates because the owner is generally not doing all of the sales or all of the lead generation and if the owner can’t clearly communicate audience realities to the employees who are handling these functions, gross inefficiencies result. 

Getting that gut-knowledge out into the open doesn’t just help your marketing and sales teams reach and respond to your audience better, it also opens the conversation and allows new perspectives, information, and ultimately, solutions to come to the surface. 

As an example, I once was working with a financial advisor to try to understand who he wanted to target with his marketing and how to get his audience to move from consuming his content to deciding to sit down for an initial consultation with him. 

I went through a questionnaire with him, gathering all kinds of information about which of the clients in his book were his favorite to work with, his process for vetting and onboarding new clients, and in which parts of his sales process he was experiencing that spark of connection between him and a potential client. 

Throughout the questionnaire, he was friendly and chatty with me, but every time I would ask him a question that got into the specific characteristics of his preferred clients, he would come back with some defensiveness and kept repeating that he would work with anyone and that he would never turn away a committed investor who was serious about executing on a plan with him. 

By the time we got to the end, we had some really good data on the very clear preferences he had for specific client profiles, despite the defensiveness.

It turned out that he was worried about coming across as snobby, elitist, or greedy if he was direct with me about the specific circumstances and personality traits that were most likely to result in a good match between his services and client needs. 

I think that this is a pretty common feeling for owners. They worry that their instincts about their client base are going to reflect poorly on their own character. 

Instead of viewing this information as somehow grubby or callous, it’s important for business owners to have a clear eye about what they’re offering and who it’s useful for.

As long as you are running an ethical practice, it is perfectly appropriate and frankly, key to your ability to serve the public, to assess and deeply understand what you’re doing and for whom. This can and should also include what free or discounted services you offer to those who can benefit from your service, but who are not going to be a primary target of your revenue arm. 

If you can’t do business well, you won’t have the funds to do free or low cost public service well, either.