One of the biggest complaints of my clients who are selling to corporations is that decision makers either 1. think they can do it on their own to save the expense or 2. would rather hire or use an internal resource to save the expense. This can be very frustrating because as a recruiter recently told me “the company admitted that they were getting mediocre candidates by having their internal staff do the recruiting but they were ok with that!”
Here is some advice to avoid the angst of running up against Do-It-Yourselfers:
You Are What You Attract
I had a client who had built her own website, done her own social media, and learned how to do PR so she could avoid the cost of hiring it out. She even did her own bookkeeping and accounting. All in the name of having control and cost savings. She was her own best Do-It-Yourselfer. Strangely enough, that’s all she kept attracting in her business. Prospects who desperately needed her help but would rather do it themselves. Unfortunately whether it’s an energetic pull or more subtle cues the business gives out, Do-It-Yourselfers always attract other Do-It-Yourselfers. So stop the cycle of madness and invest in getting help for your business. You’ll see a huge shift in who you attract.
Position Yourself As The Authority In Your Specialty
Most companies have a resource for most of what we all do. They either have someone outside the organization they already work with or have it handled internally. What I’ve seen when I hired during my 20-year career with Tier 1 companies was that when we had a very specific issue that our current resources couldn’t handle, we went outside the norm to hire someone. For example, when my client Gina was a generic leadership coach, she struggled to get new clients. When we repositioned her to specialize in teaching leaders the art of Decision Making (which apparently was a very expensive problem in her target industry), it really opened up her prospects and allowed her to have different conversations with decision makers around this very specific topic.
Do Marketing Beyond Referrals
Most business owners are skating by on referrals and current client work. They are too busy and too reluctant to actually get out there and market to get new business. Guess what happens when YOU don’t decide who to pursue as clients? You get what you get and you’re grateful for it because it pays the bills. However, it’s a one-way ticket to a dead-end road called ‘Bad Prospects’. And yes, Do-It-Yourselfers are indeed Bad Prospects. They’re often too small, too cheap and too controlling. So if you want to get out of the rut of attracting just anybody who’ll come your way and instead focus on getting more qualified leads in the door, you have to start getting a marketing strategy that attracts bigger and better fish.
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