COUNTER CONVENTIONAL WISDOM
Hard Sell Sells
Would You Buy A Used Car...?
One of the great exercises in frustration is trying to get some sell into a brochure for a professional firm.
It's easy for products. "We make the world's best Gizmo!" Or, "With our Hotchkiss, you can go faster than ever!"
But how do you use an exclamation point in a brochure about a law or accounting or consulting firm? "Our offices have cleaner windows!"? How about, "Our thoughts are assembled faster than anybody else's in the profession!"?
Having gotten over that hurdle -- by realizing that there's no way around it -- try thinking about words like "honest", or "service", or "creative." This is where you try to tell other people what they should think of you. "We give creative service to your needs." What does that mean? Does it mean that you give clients what they pay for? Does it mean that they get their money's worth? Does creative mean you make it up as you go along?
The problem is that brochure writers -- and ad and direct mail writers, too -- are trained to sell, to use adjectives and emotionally laden words that move you toward a purchase. They're trained to find distinguishing factors, and unique selling propositions, and all those Madison Avenue words.
Unfortunately, that's not how it works in professional services marketing. As has frequently been said in these pages, you can't say, "We do better audits," or "We write better briefs."
In other words, you can't use hard sell.
But that's not so horrible. In fact, it's what professional service marketing is all about. What you can do is really more interesting.
You can deal with facts. You can say, "Every client's account is managed by a partner, no matter how small the account." That's a fact that says more than all the adjectives you can summon up.
You can say, "We deal with problems in patents and copyrights with more than just attorneys. We have a full staff of physicists, chemists and other scientists who work closely with our attorneys." You can say that every person on the staff functions with state-of-the-art computer software, to increase efficiency and lower costs of serving our clients. These are statement of fact, and they're more compelling than any slick selling technique.
You can describe specific problems, and explain how you deal with them. "The strategies we design for controlling the flow of commodities to our clients' plants have increased our clients' productivity by 35%." If this is true, then it says more to sell than does any selling language.
If being creative is really important to you, you can make the point without using the word, by describing several situations in which your innovative approaches solved specific problems.
Perhaps the guiding rule is in the old saying, "What you are speaks so loudly that I can't hear what you say you are."
One of the reasons this approach is so much more compelling than the old techniques of adjectives and hard sell is that nobody hires a lawyer or an accountant or a consultant from an ad or a brochure. The marketing devices may generate an interest in a firm that clearly offers a solution to a problem. They may cause a predilection towards a specific firm. But in the final analysis, brochures and ads don't sell professional services,, only professionals do.
Hard sell, then, rarely has a place in professional services marketing, and that's good. It forces us to be thoughtful and innovative. And that's really creative.