Attorney Bruce Stachenfeld writes that marketing is unpredictable and random. You don’t know who will respond to anything you do so the best thing to do is to have more interactions with more people.
Spend more time “out and about,” he says, interacting with more people, and let the results come as they may.
He’s right, but only to a point. You don’t know who will hire you, provide referrals or introductions, or otherwise help you, so the more interactions you have, the more chances you have to “make rain”.
He doesn’t mention interactions with people via other methods–social media, speaking, articles, blogging, advertising, direct mail, and so on, but I assume he would agree that those count. Get yourself and your message in front of more people and you’ll get more business.
But it’s not that simple. It’s not just a numbers game. Not even close. Who you interact with, either personally or via another medium, is often more important than how many.
Dance with the wrong people and you’ll forever spin your wheels. Dance with the right people and you not only increase the odds of something happening, you increase the odds that when it does, it can happen on a much bigger scale.
If you are an estate planning lawyer and you want high income clients, doesn’t it make more sense to network with financial advisers who have well-to-do clients, rather than school teachers?
And then there is your methodology. The strength of your marketing materials, how your offer is packaged, how well your message is articulated and delivered, your follow-up sequence, your salesmanship, and many other factors, all affect your outcomes.
When you meet people, your interpersonal skills, grooming, likability, and other factors, are also key.
Stachenfeld, who has a math background, says,
“Mathematically, spending twenty-four working hours writing an article may not be as useful as spending those twenty-four hours doing other things, like contacting people to talk about ideas, getting together with them, calling others or even playing a round of golf.”
Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe you aren’t that good at networking. Maybe you hate golf. And maybe the article you spent extra time crafting hits all the right buttons and you get ten new clients from it within a few days.
Marketing is a numbers game. Math is a part of it. But so is art.
How to get better results from your marketing
