The recently-concluded Winter Olympics, with the rather magical combination of sports, achievement and nationalism all rolled into a two-week extravaganza, remind me of the importance of passion, energy and willpower in achieving our goals. However, you don’t get there without real and fundamental talent. Of course, The Olympics are a marketing machine in their own right.
The challenge for all of us in defining our business and marketing success is to connect these soft and hard elements into a cohesive picture and then develop the habits and discipline to stay the course as we grow. As I’ve noted in previous postings, most of us find the behaviors necessary for marketing and sales success to be uncomfortable and unnatural so we either avoid doing what we should be doing, or try things for a while before reverting to our usual patterns. We alas also are often suckers for sales reps who play their emotional sales and marketing secrets on us and get us to do what they want us to do, which may not always be in our best (business) interest.
I’ve seen plenty of situations where the best contractors, architects and engineers are not really the best marketers. They are so good at their craft that they attract enough repeat and inbound referral business to succeed. Then the economy turns rough and they need to think marketing. They’ll sometimes grudgingly then go to work to drum up some business but the last thing they want is to be associated with “business development,” that rather fancy word for “sales.”
So they look to “marketing,” somehow getting people to call in, but advertising is expensive and never works as well as word-of-mouth (and I suspect, for some readers here, has never worked at all.)
I’ve spent the past few years seeking a sustainable and practical way for non-marketers to succeed at marketing and have concluded that your best chance of success is to have fun with the process. Do what you love doing and connect your passion with the real passions of your current and potential clients. The challenge is (a) to determine your passions, (b) figure out who your clients/potential clients are and their passions and (c) find the match.
