Think like a marketing director when you’re preparing for that all important first new business meeting with an important CMO.
You’ve done your preparation, but remember, so has your prospect. Typically they’re pretty busy people and believe it or not they don’t spend all day thinking about agencies, dealing with agencies is typically about 10% of what they do or would LIKE to do!
So they usually leave it as late as possible so they’ve got a good idea about you before the meeting takes place. Ten minutes before they’re due to meet, they go back to the email you sent confirming the meeting and if they’re like me they right click on the email address and then visit the website from the domain contained therein.
Rule one.
Make sure that the email domain points to your website. Common sense really, but you’d be surprised. One of our PR clients recently came back from a meeting and said to me “they thought we were an ad agency! where did they get that idea from!”. Well, we had several emails to and fro with the prospect discussing possible PR projects so this was a mystery to us all.
But wait! There was the answer. The PR agency email addresses were from the same domain as their sister agency, the much larger advertising agency they shared a building with – IT had obviously decided to make life easier for themselves. Oops. Think like a marketing director, they don’t have time to check for your errors!
Rule two.
Make sure your website gives the right impression. For the sake of argument, let’s assume you’re going in to try to get them to use you for their social marketing. What would you expect? Well, I’d expect a really good socially enabled website, I’d expect them to be an agency that is talked about and respected. Think like a marketing director, that’s what they’d expect to see.
So, how many followers do you have on Twitter? I’d expect them to be using Facebook really well and for them to have a lot of interaction on it – how many Likes do you have? I’d also expect them to have a lot of people subscribed to their email list – so if you have one of those gadgets that tells people to “Join us like ten other people us” then maybe remove i! I’d also expect them to be using Pinterest in a creative and entertaining manner.
Don’t expect anyone to trust you to do for them what you don’t do for yourself.
