When you connect with a potential new client, are you persuading or just hoping? When you write a proposal to pursue a speaking engagement, are you persuading or just hoping? When you share a new offering in your business, are you persuading or just hoping?
This question came up for me today when I was helping one of my clients with her launch plan for an upcoming teleseminar. As we read through the optin-page copy, and then the sales letter for the offer she was going to make, it became clear that she was holding back. She is a very experienced and successful consultant, and has been able to create fantastic results for her clients. Yet her optin page and salesletter didn’t reflect any of this.
In fact, they read more like she was hoping or praying that people would attend, instead of persuading them to do so.
When I asked her about this, she knew- right away- what I was asking about, and she said, “Well, I’m not sure how much to say about myself. I’m not sure how much to make it about me versus keeping the focus on them.”
To which I replied, gently, “Well, you need at least a little more about you.”
In this environment of ever-increasing focus on the customer or client, it can be easy to lose track of the fact that we each need to present ourselves as persuasively as possible, in order to create distinctiveness and uniqueness in the minds of our potential clients.
Yet many skilled and high-level professionals hold back from what they see as “bragging” or “making it all about them.”
The longer I am in business, the more it appears to me that we each must “make it about us” in order to attract a client, and then we “make it about them” as we work with the client.
This isn’t detracting from the idea that you have to have a message that your prospective client wants to hear. I’m just suggesting that we look at how we can utilize that message to also persuade the prospective client in our favor.
When we share about who we are, what we have done, and what we can do, we move our marketing from the realm of hoping to persuading.
