Obviously, I think it’s a useful metaphor.
And funny, which I like.
It’s a metaphor for Relationship Marketing which you should be investing in hard (get it?)
If you do business with other businesses, Business-to-Business marketing, it’s sometimes called, or B2B.
It’s not the only way to market to a business but it is a very powerful way and possibly the most powerful way to market a trade business to business customers.
For construction subcontractors like electricians, plumbers, concreters and tilers, etc. – it’s builders.
For builders, it can be architects (who often have the customers first), developers and commercial customers (restaurants, shops, chains, hotels, building and strategy managers, property managers).
For maintenance trades, it could be property managers (real estates), strategy managers, building managers and businesses like nursing homes, shops, factories etc. (electricians, plumbers, property maintenance, painters, garden maintenance, etc.)
Does this make sense to you?
There’s a reason that this marketing is so important for you – most of these businesses aren’t out there looking for suppliers like you.
They either already have someone doing that work for them or they have other businesses like yours knocking on the door from time to time asking to do work or quote on work.
So, when you’re also knocking on the door, you’re probably not getting a look-in.
They’re not, in any meaningful way, hitting Google to find a trade like yours or seeing your posts on Facebook and thinking, ‘I should call those guys.’
They’ve already got relationships.
So your job is to build and then maintain relationships with some or some more of your chosen business.
Back to our BJ metaphor
You need to contact them and do something nice or something useful.
You need to start to get to know each other, establish trust (both ways) and decide if you like each other.
Your customer needs to know, like and trust you or your business before they’ll buy and you need to know, like and trust them before you’ll do a job for them.
Just like a BJ…
Enough about it, the joke only goes so far.
You need to identify the business you want to work with and the people in them you need to talk to.
You need to make contact and start getting to know each other.
You need to keep making contact and being useful and nice and generous and helpful (but not pestering) until an opportunity arises for them to ask you to quote or do some work.
You need to be there (in the relationship) when an opportunity appears – when the current provider stuffs up or has no capacity or they fall out or are unavailable or…
And you need to track your interactions and plan your next calls so you remember to call people regularly and what you said last time, etc.
If you’re doing this on a large scale, you’d use a CRM system → Customer Relationship Management is what it stands for.
But if your business needs less than 100 people or so, that’s probably overkill, and a simple tracker will do the trick.
My clients use a Relationship Marketing Tracker.
A simple spreadsheet with 2 tabs – one for existing relationships you need to look after and one for potential new relationships you’d like to build.
Hands up if you want it and happy b**# j**#%g.