Way back in the introductory chapter, I defined marketing as the act of motivating someone to take action. Marketing means getting people to want to buy, whereas selling is a manipulative process to close the deal quickly so you can move on to the next prospect. Selling focuses on the transaction, whereas marketing focuses on building relationships that will result in a long-term series of transactions.
Rainmakers do not sell. Never. They create an environment and a multidimensional dialogue in which the client can visualize and experience the benefits of the particular product or service. Most importantly, rainmaker-style marketing is about proffering advice and helping to guide the client through his or her personal decision tree. And they accomplish this not by a series of self-serving statements, but rather by asking well-targeted and increasingly specific questions. Statements let people know what you’re thinking; questions elicit what others are thinking.
I recently experienced a perfect example of how soft-selling and hard-marketing can make a big difference in both perception and reality. My business partner and I were looking for new office space. We wanted to move quickly and were willing to pay market rates. You would think that this presented a prime opportunity that real estate brokers would jump all over. The reality, however, was quite the opposite. Brokers did not return phone calls, could not answer the most basic questions regarding the properties they showed us, and disregarded the key features we were looking for. They didn’t listen and they didn’t seem to care. And then we found Jay Blacker of the Denenberg Realty Group. We had responded to a simple ad he had placed on CraigsList.com. The first time I called, he was about to step into a meeting and said he would call back within twenty minutes, which he did. He asked a few basic questions and asked if he could meet with us at our temporary office space. I knew immediately that Jay approached his career differently than the other brokers we had dealt with. No one else had even hinted of meeting with us prior to showing us properties. When Jay visited our office, he used it as an opportunity to better assess what we were looking for in terms of what we liked and didn’t like about our current space. He asked questions to help gauge the relative importance of such variables as windowed offices vs. inside offices, our need for conference rooms and kitchens, lease duration, and parking availability. He wanted to know how often clients would visit and how large a reception area we would need. These all sound like commonsense questions, but none of Jay’s competitors asked them. After his initial fact-finding, Jay explained how he worked with clients and gave us a list of references of local business owners he had helped. And rather than showing us just the one property we had inquired about, he suggested we schedule a block of time the following week to look at a half-dozen properties that fit our requirements so we could make side-by-side comparisons. When the day came, he prepped us with key information before we entered each space, and pointed out the pros and cons of each option as we toured the sites. He never tried to sway us towards one property over another; rather, he genuinely wanted us to find space that suited our needs. And we did, and Jay walked beside us through the proposal process and the leasing contract. He didn’t close the sale; he facilitated the buy.
The last place you would ever expect to see soft-selling and hard-marketing is in retail.
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Bob Costas knows baseball, but by evidence of his statements to Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin - U.S. Olympic silver and gold medalists, teammates, friends and Beijing roommates - he really doesn't get gymnastics:
Phil Fragasso is an experienced marketer, author of the engaging new book 