A couple of months ago, I went fly fishing for the first time. My wife had booked us for a day long trip on one of the local rivers. It was a great setup – they provided all of the gear, instruction, the boat and everything else we needed for a day on the river.
When we got to the first spot, the guide gave us a quick tutorial on casting, and how to actually fly fish. The first thing he said struck me.
‘Trout are lazy Fish.’
He went on to talk about how it was the job of the angler to let the fly mimic the actual motion of the fly larva as they rise up from the riverbed, and then let it float right in front of the fish. He talked at length about how trout will find the place in the current where the insects are running and they position themselves so they don’t have to move at all.
At one point, after about a half hour of casting and seeing nothing, he instructed me to walk downstream a few feet.
‘I’ve seen it a lot. The fish can’t be bothered to move three feet from where they are. You have to come to them.’
After a lot of patience, trial and error, we ended up with a few catches that day, but it got me thinking about marketing and sales. I’m not saying that your customers or prospects are lazy, so please hold your comments. What I am saying is that there is an awful lot of inertia in place. Good trainers and marketers know that it takes a number of exposures to a particular product or service. I’ve heard seven as the magic number, but I also know that it’s probably not a hard and fast rule. When I was advising (and not necessarily selling) it often took a number of conversations to get a client to move on something that they needed to do. Often, I wasn’t selling a thing, but simply asking them to consider the advice I was giving, that they had already paid for.
So, what tools does one have to do a better job with their catch?
Honestly, I don’t know all of the answers. I’m an accidental entrepreneur, so my marketing knowledge is more trial by fire than anything. But there are a couple of things that I have learned that work for me:
A consistent message:
Often, in the advisory business, I saw a lot of ‘Flavor of the month’ type of solutions for clients, especially in the investment space. For me, I always did what I could to stay on message. Stick with the tried and true solutions for the long term, and don’t get swayed by the short term excitement of something new and shiny.
Come to where the client is:
Some clients took months to convert. Some were ready to sign during the first meeting (which is a red flag in itself). I always prided myself in being able to meet a prospective client where they were. I could afford patient, and I also knew that in a lot of cases, they needed me more than I needed them.
Full faith in the solution:
I wasn’t the right fit for everyone, but when I was giving advice, I felt completely confident that I was going to better their lives when they listened to what I had to say. I wouldn’t say the same for the trout that we hooked that afternoon on the river, but for the clients I was serving, I knew with my full heart that I was offering a path for greater good in their lives.
What do you, as a business owner do to engage your prospects in clever and interesting ways?