Page 32 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

Your opportunities for growth often lie outside the confines of your current
industry description. In fact, fighting within those confines, particularly in
mature industries, can cause you to spill too much of your blood and money.

Your great opportunities are in your answer to that question: What are we
good at?

In planning your marketing, don’t just think of your business.Think of
your skills.

What Are You Really Selling?

People in the fast-food business used to think they were selling food.
Then McDonald’s came along and figured out that people weren’t buying

hamburgers. People were buying an experience.
Burger King’s brass were sure that McDonald’s was wrong. Knowing they

made the flame-broiled hamburgers that more people preferred, Burger King
executives decided to take that unique point of difference and pummel
McDonald’s with it: “We’re flame broiled, not fried.”

This pummeling accomplished nothing, because McDonald’s was right: Fast-
food hamburger restaurants are not in the hamburger business.

Maybe you think prospects in your industry are looking for hamburgers.
Chances are that they want something else. The first company to figure out what
that is wins.

Find out what clients are really buying.

One Thing Most Experts Don’t Know

Most companies in expert services—such as lawyers, doctors, and accountants—
think that their clients are buying expertise. But most prospects for these
complex services cannot evaluate expertise; they cannot tell a really good tax
return, a clever motion, or a perceptive diagnosis. But they c a n tell if the
relationship is good and if phone calls are returned. Clients are experts at
knowing if they feel valued.

In most professional services, you are not really selling expertise—because
your expertise is assumed, and because your prospect cannot intelligently
evaluate your expertise anyway. Instead, you are selling a relationship. And in