Want to sell? Market. — Kelford Labs Weekly

When you know you’ve got something good, you want to offer it to people.

I notice this most often with B2B service providers, like marketing consultants, or business strategists, or branding designers. When they create a new service offering they know has real value, they have this instinct to just... sell it.

Like, instead of doing a slow, steady roll-out of marketing to promote it, they just want to directly offer it. They want to set up calls and meetings, or send out cold emails.

Because they know what they’re offering is good. They know it’s valuable.

And so, they think, all they need to do is offer it and clients will buy.

But, well, they don’t. Or they don’t even get the calls and meetings.

Why? Because nothing sells itself. Electricity had to be marketed, customers have to be created.

If you took every one who had something useful to offer up on their sales pitch, you wouldn’t have any money or time left over. Because we’re all inundated, all day every day, with great offers that are valuable.

We just don’t have the time, interest, inclination, or ability to seize every one.

And neither do your ideal clients. Not in one email. Not in one call. Not in one meeting. 

Not just because we offered it.

No, we’ve got to market it.

Demonstrating value at a distance

Marketing isn’t about taking something useless and making it appealing. It’s about taking something useful and demonstrating its usefulness at a distance.

So the people who need it know about it and can do something about it.

So if we want more calls or meetings, we should focus on getting more people to want to have those calls and meetings. By getting their attention before they experience a challenge or opportunity that creates demand for what we sell.

That’s why I’m always suggesting we create content about our processes, it gives us something unique to post about, to run ads about, to generate interest about. And if you have a unique service offering, creating content about it, explaining your process and your perspective, is a great way to start building attention and interest before the conversation.

And it will help you test and workshop the language you use to describe it.

Demonstrating values over time

If marketing is demonstrating value at a distance, branding is about demonstrating our values over time. It's about how we present our business and what it does at all times.

This demonstrates to our prospects and clients what we value and prioritize, so they can determine whether we’d be a good fit for their challenge.

So when we skip that stage and jump right to trying to get people on the phone or in the room, we are demonstrating what we prioritize: ourselves. Our timeline. Our schedule. Our interest, our enthusiasm.

But when we take the time to demonstrate our values, we’re able to help our ideal customers identify their own interest in us, and do something about it.

That means making sure that how we offer our service is professionally presented, polished, and precise. That it doesn’t appear thrown together or rushed out the door.

That it demonstrates we care by showing care and attention in our presentation before we have the call or meeting.

Demonstrating value in the moment

If marketing is demonstrating value at a distance, and branding is demonstrating our values over time, sales is demonstrating value in the moment.

Which means, all that marketing and branding work helps us in the meeting. It gives us content we’ve created and rehearsed that we can simply repurpose in the conversation and tailor to the audience.

It helps us identify the right people to talk to, the ones who want to talk to us, instead of focusing on our list of ideal prospects or who we imagine to be the right fit.

It helps us pre-qualify our prospects by filtering them through our content about our process, so by the time we have the conversation about buying, they’re already bought in to how we work.

And it helps us develop trust before the meeting, because we’ve already made and kept promises. Our content promises to be helpful, and then it is, making our prospects more likely to believe our services will help them.

Demonstrating value before the meeting

I get it, we know we can help, so we just want to get to helping. And we want to go fast.

But rushing our clients or rushing our outreach doesn’t actually get us anywhere any faster, it just gets us frustrated, disillusioned, and disappointed.

Because if we try to skip the middle steps, we get lost in the chasm in between. We lose the prospects because we tried to rush them, or we botch the opportunity because we weren’t prepared enough.

Or we never get the call or meeting because we weren’t able to generate enough interest ahead of time.

But when we have something really, truly helpful, we owe it to our ideal customers to demonstrate its helpfulness and our credibility.

We can’t expect them to simply trust us because we have an offering, everybody does. We have to build the trust ahead of time by demonstrating our value and values at a distance, and over time.

And then, when we get the meeting, we’re more likely to get the client.

Because we didn’t just try to sell, we took the time to market.

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