How to use love and an attitude of service as powerful business-development tools

Think of the last time you had a major problem you needed help with. It doesn’t have to be work related. It could be a problem like the one we faced recently, when our furnace quit working the night the outside temperature plunged to 20 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). When you found the person who solved that problem for you, how did you feel? Grateful? Thankful? Like they’d been sent in answer to your prayers? I know that I kept asking our new BFF Mike, from Colony Heating and Air Conditioning, if I could feed him, make him coffee, get a cushion for his knees, adopt him…

Now ponder the fact that you are that person for your ideal client. You are the one who makes their heart feel full to bursting with gratitude and renewed energy. You are the one who enables them to climb out of the pit they’ve fallen into and get back on the road to achieving their important goals.

So that begs the question: Why are you sometimes reluctant to let prospects know exactly how much you can help them? Why do you allow a dislike of “selling” to keep you from being of service? What give you the right NOT to make yourself available to people you know you can help?

When you connect with your ideal clients, everyone wins.

I feel that approaching your sales and marketing efforts from a posture of love and selfless service is pretty much a no-lose proposition. It serves to remind you that you have a right—even a responsibility—to share your talents with those who need them. It enables you to remember you’re entitled to a fair exchange of value: their money for your problem-solving skills. And it makes it easier to adopt the attitude of under-promising and over-delivering—a relative rarity in today’s business climate, and thus a powerful differentiator in your marketing communications.

Taken all together, those are actually pretty powerful tools in your business-development package. While you naturally don’t want to ignore the more mundane issues of using appropriate social media to connect with your ideal prospects, knowing what keywords they search for online, and providing substantive content, you also don’t want to ignore the value of a more heart-based approach to marketing.

So, what do you think? Too woo-woo? Or a nice way to balance out SEO, PPC, DM’s, and other impersonal tech tools?

By the way, thanks to Manu_H for the amazing heart of light, and to the U.S. Secretary of Defense (really) for the pictures of vets with their service dogs.  I found both in the Creative Commons section of Flickr.

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