Your sales person has brought a potential client into the office, your team has made the stellar pitch, and the energy between everyone was electric. In the end the $20,000 a month deal went to another agency. After going through the usual check-list of reasons in your head try going through this additional list.
- Techie-Talk – Most search marketers that I know don’t have a marketing background. Most of them have a tech background which drove them to search. If they can’t speak money to a client the deal is probably going to be hard to get past that business’s marketing department.
- Condescension – Trying to prove to a potential client that you know your stuff by throwing out all the industry jargon can come off like a call to a tech-support guru. The caller walks away feeling insulted.
- Confusing Data – Clients only care about click-through-rate if that means more money for their company. This is like the number one issue. If they can’t understand the data then it is worthless information.
- Reputation – It is too easy to mislead a company, and the corporations are catching onto this fact. They are acting more and more like the sales process is an interview. They are searching the web for the name of the agencies they are talking to. Poor placement on the search engines or negative links look like your company doesn’t know what it is doing. Talk the talk. Walk the walk.
- Employees – This is the same as the last note, except that it applies to the employees. Any person the potential client might meet is game for being searched. Who really cares if one of your people has posts about their drunken exploits on their MySpace page? Your clients do. It smacks of a lack of professionalism.
Just because you’re in the industry doesn’t mean you can fool clients. It is just too competitive out there. Make sure your clients see the best side of you, and you will be rewarded.
No comments:
Post a Comment