Networking

How to Gain your Prospective Clients’ Attention and Generate the Leads You Need to Make Your Business a Success

If you’ve ever tried to get a child who is engrossed in their favorite video to do another task you know you must first get their attention. Often the best way to do this is to use their name so they realize you are speaking directly to them. The process of effective lead generation requires that we communicate with many prospective clients at one time. Before we can communicate with them we must first get their attention. And our prospective clients must each feel we are talking directly to them.

Getting a prospective client’s attention is not an easy task, especially given the hundreds of thousands of other products and services that are also competing for their attention. Like the mother who has learned to “tune-out” her kids bickering in the back-seat while she is trying to drive, our prospects have learned to tune out all the promotional clutter that bombards them daily. Here is a four step process to gain your prospects’ attention and help generate the leads you need to make your business a success.

1. Define Your Target Market: To gain prospective clients’ attention you must understand their biggest problems and greatest desires. This requires really knowing your target market. And in order to know your target market you must first define that market. What is the profile of your ideal client? Many people resist defining an ideal client. However unless you know specifically who you want to talk to, your promotional efforts will fall on deaf ears. Not having a defined target for your marketing communications is like yelling into a room full of kids watching TV, “Will someone please take out the trash?” They will all assume you are talking to someone else. The odds of actually having the trash taken out increase significantly when you say, “Bobby, will you please take the trash out now?”

2. Identify Problems and Desires: In conversations with current clients or prospective clients that fit the profile of your ideal client, what are the “themes” that continue to surface and which of these themes can you help with - a desire for a more fulfilling career; the ability to recapture romance in their relationships; a need to get spending under control and eliminate debt; a summer home on Nantucket; tools to better communicate with their teenage kids? The list is endless. The key is identifying the intersection of your target market’s most pressing problems or desires and your greatest strengths. If you don’t know and really understand the most pressing problems and deepest desires of your target market it’s time to do some research. Get out and talk with people who meet the profile of your ideal client. Be really curious about them, ask questions. Find out what occupies their mind, what keeps them awake at night, what they dream of having, being or doing. You’re not trying to sell at this stage you are only trying to get to know your target market better.

3. Start Where Your Prospects Currently Are: It is often tempting to paint a picture of a fabulous outcome without first clearly identifying the problem or desire. I used to do marketing for a psychiatric hospital that ran television advertising. The most effective ads were not those that showed happy, well adjusted kids playing on the playground - the outcome of treatment. The parents of kids with emotional issues did not relate to the images of these kids. We first had to show the child sitting all alone in the swing crying because no one wanted to play with him or her. This is what caught the attention of the parents of kids who needed treatment. Only after we captured their attention with an image they could relate to right then were we able to talk with them about the solution to the problem. Another very effective ad showed a woman sitting alone in the woods contemplating taking a handful of pills. Women thinking about taking their own lives related to that ad, they picked up the phone and called for help. Your first goal is to get a prospect to say, “Hey, that’s me, that’s my exact situation, that’s the problem I’m facing right now. If they have helped others in that same situation maybe they can help me.”

4. Talk Directly to Your Ideal Prospects: In a personalized letter or a one-on-one conversation you can address your prospect by name. However with promotional pieces such as brochures, flyers, direct mail or advertising this is not possible. In these instances direct response copywriter Alexi Neocleous suggests starting your ad, post card or letter with, “Attention (target market description)”. For example, “Attention Renters”; “Attention Business Owners”; or “Attention Parents of Teenage Drivers”. Another way of talking directly to your prospect is to ask a question regarding a problem or desire of your target market. For example, “Are you approaching retirement and concerned about what you’ll do with all the free time on your hands?”; “Are you considering a career change?”; or “Are you so busy taking care of everyone else that you don’t have time to take care of yourself?”

The key to effectively capturing a prospective client’s attention is to really understand the problems that keep them awake at night or the desires they dream of having met. People buy for two reasons:

1. To get problems solved, or

2. To have desires met.

Once you clearly understand the problems your prospects want solved and the desires they have you can utilize this information in your promotional materials to capture their attention and generate an ongoing stream of leads.

© 2005 STRATEGIES-BY-DESIGN.

Julie Chance is president of Strategies-by-Design, a Dallas-based firm that helps businesses from independent professionals to specialty retailers Map A Path to Success by attracting leads and turning those leads into loyal customers. Strategies-by-Design provides a unique combination of consulting, coaching and training to help clients improve the return on their investment in marketing and promotional activities. For more information or to sign-up for their marketing tips newsletter, go to http://www.strategies-by-design.com or call 972-701-9311.

Share This

If you are a net worker and want to become more efficient on meeting the right people, well then let me suggest not being the first person at the event or party. You see it makes sense to let the crowd sort itself out first. You can allow the shameless sales people and hardcore party pitchers to make their sales spiels and let the party separate into groups.

Then when you come in some folks will be bored talking with the same people they talk to each week and the party crashers, free food groupies and shameless sales people will have separated you see? Then a quick glance of the room and a few one liners with the host and you will see exactly who is worthy to talk with and which group will come find you anyway later on.

Without trying to sound rude, I think it necessary to lay out the reality. How do I know this? Well in my life I have gone to networking meetings in communities in 23-states and over 100 cities and most of these human get togethers are quite similar and now when I walk in a room it is fairly obvious to immediately tell who is who and with a little practice I am certain you can too.

Not by what they wear, but rather by how they stand, what they say and the wisdom they purvey. I hope this article does not piss you off or upset you, you will learn with time if it does and someday you will agree with me and understand. Be well and have fun networking take my advice if you will and I ask that you consider this in 2006.

Lance Winslow

Share This

Which questions do you need to ask to even get a hint
if you really want to know something about another person’s business pain?

We define business pain as a problem that a business needs to have a solution for. The pain may be that they do not have enough sales, or they do not have an appropriate process in order to track their forecasting. The pain could even be that they cannot hire the appropriate staff in order the handle daily requirements. Most often when you are at an event, the business person will talk about what is bothering them at work. They do not talk about their successes (especially if they are being heard) and they do not talk about other wins. They will talk about their pain. It is through asking questions that you will find out what that pain is.

One good question would be to ask: “How are your sales doing this quarter?”, or this year. You may also ask them what they are currently working on in order to improve their business processes. There are a host of other questions you can ask in order to get the answers you are looking for. When asking questions, you do not need to get into specifics; you need to generalize as you want to make the appointment to go deeper into what their company does. The goal of diving into the business pain is not to find out what the pain is per se, it is to find out that there is pain and in what areas. If you are specifically interested in sales, then the questions should generally be directed around sales and not the HR questions. You must be specific about what you want to know and not what the person is leading you towards. There is often pain in more than one area of a business.

Now that you have asked all the important questions, you will receive the answers. These may not always be the ones you are looking for; it may be that you have no chance at doing business with this person. The important thing is to make sure that you listen carefully to what they have to say. You should not take notes as it is distracting to the speaker; you should spend your time practicing your listening skills.

Bette Daoust, Ph.D. has been networking with others since leaving high school years ago. Realizing that no one really cared about what she did in life unless she had someone to tell and excite. She decided to find the best ways to get people’s attention, be creative in how she presented herself and products, getting people to know who she was, and being visible all the time. Her friends and colleagues have often dubbed her the “Networking Queen”. Blueprint for Networking Success: 150 ways to promote yourself is the first in this series. Blueprint for Branding Yourself: Another 150 ways to promote yourself is planned for release in 2005. For more information visit http://BlueprintBooks.com.

Share This