Marketing Ideas – Does Anybody Want to Help?

Does anybody want to help?

By Alastair Campbell. The Ideal Marketing Company

If you are serious about growing your business, this is a useful exercise to assist you in putting across the right message to prospective customers.  You can call it re-framing if you like, but I just think of it as a genuine way of trying to see things from the other persons point of view.

Most of us like to think that by offering the products or services that we do we are helping people.  So for example at the Ideal Marketing Company my main aim is to help my clients to win more business, convert more enquiries and keep their customers for longer – that’s what we do.  Our sole focus as a business therefore is to help our clients.

What are the benefits of thinking like this?  At every stage, including an initial meeting, it means our focus is on ‘what can we do to help?’.  We only work with people who we think we can help.  Our main outcome is to help business owners grow their business.  If we don’t do this then we have failed. Or we don’t accept the business in the first place.

When I meet up with a prospective client I don’t think about selling to them, I think about how I can help them. 

Let’s face it, most of us are looking for people to help us.  That is much more useful to us than being ‘sold to’.  Being ‘sold to’ implies that somebody ‘does something’ to us.  Selling can imply manipulation, deception and tricking people into buying something they don’t want and don’t need.  Contrast this with a focus on helping somebody.  The focus changes and becomes all about assisting them to achieve results.

My suggestion to you is to forget about selling to prospects and to start thinking about ways that you can help people. Now I am not pretending to be a saint, I want to grow my own business and make money too, but I want to do this on the back of helping people.  The great American Sales Trainer Zig Ziglar once said ‘You can get anything you want in life – if you help enough people achieve what they want in life” That’s a better philosophy than screwing the last penny out of everybody that you can and tricking them into buying things that they don’t want isn’t it?

So, to paraphrase, if you want to grow your business, focus not on what other people can do for you, but what you can do to help other people. 

Alastair Campbell is MD of The Ideal Marketing Company based in Leicestershire, England.  He offers marketing ideas and support to business owners and is author of the book The Marketing Launchpad available now on Amazon. 

 He also offers a free 60 minute no obligation marketing consultation – see www.idealmarketingcompany.com for more details.

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