When you read the headline of today’s posting, your natural reaction may be “duh, I know that. “ Then you could grow a little snappy and respond: “Well, since this blog is free to read, I suppose I am getting what I am paying for.”
But there is a deeper and more important message underneath this headline. My biggest marketing mistakes have occurred when I looked gift horses in the mouth and dissed them. Perhaps I saw them as competitors.
Now that is dumb.
Real success in marketing occurs from real trust, and when you leverage that among people who can help you develop leads and sales — especially if they have relevant skills and work in your marketing space — you gain a combination of soft (but powerful) branding along with high powered leads.
I’m sharing one example in the SMPS Marketer article currently planned for publication in the upcoming issue. (I’ll save the specific details until the article is published). In this case, the marketer for an architectural practice calls and shares leads/intelligence with her counterparts at engineering practices who, in some cases, might compete with her practice for bidding opportunities. She naturally doesn’t share those sorts of leads — instead focusing on projects where the main element of the planned project requires engineering rather than architectural abilities. The trade-off. The engineering practices also share leads relevant to her, and of course virtually all projects need both engineers and architects, so who is more likely to be working with each other on joint submissions or invited to participate in “won” jobs?
Similar practices apply in the marketing space. Mike Jeffries is working with me on a marketing initiative on recommendation from Michael Stone. Stone, Jeffries and I all offer construction marketing consulting services. But you can’t really cal us competitors: We have our own specialties and niches. Most of my business, for example, is from the business-to-business rather than business-to-consumer marketplace. The marketing needs of contractors serving the general public are different than the needs of contractors whose primary clients are other business owners. Jeffries and Stone work primarily in the business-to-consumer (residential) space, but within different aspects. Sure there are areas of overlap. I often advocate intelligent cross fertilization between business and residential markets, and my book provides practical suggestions and recommendations for business-to-consumer marketers. But I’m not the best person to offer specific advice to you, even though I receive between one and five leads a day from contractors looking for just that information. Should I not refer these people to someone who can really help and will I receive something in return? Absolutely.
In other words, the advice here is to think beyond the obvious and realize your best relationships may be among people who you think initially are your competitors. And be very careful about dissing anyone. You may be dropping a hot opportunity like a lead potato. (I made that type of mistake last week. Ouch.)
Here is a useful Wikipedia article on Marketing Co-operation.
