E-Rep: 10 Ways To Serve Your Business Prospects

The goal is simple:

Serve your prospects. Don’t sell them.

This may be counter-intuitive to some, but trust me, when you are serving and helping someone, you are doing more to sell yourself than if you were ticking off the special features of your product. And by serving someone, you are developing trust. And lastly, your prospect is already getting to know what it would be like to work with you…

Now, that said, how do I serve and help someone?

Great question, and honestly, building an e-rep for yourself, and plugging into the social web, makes this process of serving someone very, very easy. The only hard part, disciplining yourself to do it consistently. Because quite frankly, for most of us, this doesn’t come naturally.

Here are just a handful of tactics you can employ to serve your prospects:

1. Find helpful news articles through your RSS readers, and forward to your prospects. “Thought you might find this helpful,” you might say…

2. Forward videos that you find on YouTube, videos about products in their market space. “I thought this was an interesting approach,” you could add.

3. Send links to meaningful online/PDF white papers, or e-books. “I enjoyed reading this, thought you would to,” you can jot down in your email…

4. Give them heads up to a question posed on a LinkedIn group. “You should check this out, very much in your ballpark,” you could say…

5. Recommend people for your prospect to follow, on virtually any social network, but most importantly where there customer-base is spending time on the web…

6. Record a personalized video, and send along to your prospect. “Hey, had an idea that I wanted to share!”

7. Send a link to a helpful sales blog. “You should subscribe, this guys has some great sales tips!”

8. Forward a link to potential customers’ website, or send along contact names. Helping someone by putting prospects/potential business in their hands? No brainer…

9. Reference your prospect, and the cool things they are doing, in your own blog and writings. Helping your prospects go to market BEFORE you are on retainer? That is memorable…

10. Look for the good works of your prospect, such as his blog posts, drafted articles, other writings where he or she is quoted. And share those with your network. Making your prospect look good is always a good strategy, and is helpful too.

So there are a few ways to help and serve your prospects.

Doing this goes a long ways towards establishing trust and confidence, and makes a sale more likely. Doing this without asking for a sale…distinguishes you and is memorable. It also increases the chances of them sending referrals your way…

What other ideas can you share about being helpful?

[cartoon by @gapingvoid]
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