The German word for sales is “Vertrieb”, which is not nice, because it suggests you want to drive someone off. “Advertising”, too, sounds rather primitive. We do not want to push ourselves to the front, do we? Neither do we want to “carry our skin or our brains to market”.
In fact, what we want is create and generate trust. That is why, first and foremost, we want to serve our customers of long standing with excellent quality. This is how we would like to justify the trust they have given us and thank them for it.
Of course, we also appreciate new customers. But we do not want to win new customers at all costs. Especially not when it means applying aggressive means or methods. Like, for example the newspaper sector habitually does it. New customers are pampered and get special premiums. The “old customers”, on the other hand, are those the publishers could not care less about. So what if they sometimes get angry?
But how to cultivate old customers? And how to win new customers?
The “boutique” might be a good parable for the service and consulting sectors. After all, we are a sort of agency, aren’t we? So let us build a nice boutique. Both in the real and the virtual world. And then we invite our customers to come and get pampered!
If we then have happy customers, we will try to make new customers aware of us. Strengthened by the success we have with the recommendations the “old” customers gave us, this can certainly be done.
The first thing we need in order to achieve it is a good visual presence. Today, it seems that it can only be done through the internet. We must see to it that we are found by the customers with the right and important themes. In order to pave the way for new faces to find the way to our boutique.
That is the challenge of marketing in our times: the automatic generation of good “leads” (as they would have been called in former times) by the internet. In order to make it possible for us to welcome new customers in our boutique. Because that is where our range of products is to be found, both real and virtual.
With this in mind, I no longer find the proverb “train the fish to jump into the boat” such a great idea. It would be better if the “fish were to visit us in our boats by their own choice”. And then we could swim some of the way together.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
For all the articles of my entrepreneur’s diary, click here: Drehscheibe.
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