IN THESE TOUGH TIMES, list brokers everywhere are hustling for new business. In our field, that means coming up with new clients, and quite a few brokers are having sleepless nights trying to figure out how to do it.
Getting clients is difficult in the best of times. You have to pry mailers away from their current brokers, and while mailers are not inherently loyal, a whole set of factors weighs in to maintain close day-to-day relationships between brokers and mailers, such as brokers’ maintenance of key paperwork for mailers. And, of course, friendships always get in the way of doing business — or is it the other way around?
Above all, it is extraordinarily troublesome for a broker to convince a prospect that he has the talents essential to handle the business. He can thump his breast, Tarzan-style, and repeat the standard mantra: “You client, I wonderful” all he wants, but the business will not come swinging through the trees. He can talk about his service, his marketing skills and good personal hygiene until he’s blue in the face, but that will not suffice.
What will work? We can articulate the methods by which brokers successfully woo prospects. In fact, short of kidnapping the mailer’s daughter, I can think of only four time-proven methods that have been used historically and successfully by brokers to attract business:
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The “friend-get-a-friend” technique.
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Getting a new broker or manager from another firm.
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Actually buying or merging with a brokerage house.
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The adoption of a specific corporate identity to heighten mailer interest.
The first three are time-dependent — that is, they hinge on the vicissitudes of other people’s businesses.
Take the “friend-get-a-friend” approach. If a key executive at a mailer-client company moves, and a broker has worked closely with him in the past, the brokerage house has a prospective new client.
Likewise, if an account executive at a competitive brokerage house is unhappy, and if he is lucky enough not to have a non-compete agreement, the house then has an opportunity to acquire a new broker — and probably most of his clients.
Finally, if a competitive brokerage house is in trouble, and your firm is au courant, it might have a shot at picking up the competitor and its accounts. All that is wonderful, but a broker has little or no control over these events.
That leaves the fourth method — the adoption of a specific corporate identity.
The development of a unique corporate identity is not time-dependent. The broker does not have to wait for a specific mailer to feel the need to change brokerage houses. The big difference here is that by reinventing its own image in advance, the alert brokerage house has already sent a message to a specific segment of the mailer community: It is available, it is willing, and most important, it has the credentials to handle the mailer’s account.
The underlying assumption on the part of the promotionally minded brokerage house is that a body of mailers will wish to change brokers in the course of a given period of time, and interest by these mailers can be generated well in advance of the crisis.
Not all mailers will bite, of course. But if the identity created by the brokerage house is effective, many mailers will feel the need for the utility offered by that house. So if a brokerage builds a broad enough identity, they will come.
What are these identities?
Well, the most obvious is the vertical-subject identity. A house that advertises itself as an expert in the fundraising field, for example, will certainly draw the interest of appropriate needy mailers in the fundraising community.
A second type of identity involves the tactical advantage of size — both large and small. The large brokerage house, particularly one with a sizable management unit, can argue that it will present advantages to a mailer that a smaller house will not — the ability to acquire first usage on managed lists, to name one. A very small but specialized house can argue that it will spend every minute of every waking day thinking about the prospect. This latter type of approach has not had a great deal of success, I am sorry to report, because for some reason mailers are much less impressed by modesty of size than by clout. But it can be very effective if used properly.
A third kind of identity involves technological expertise. If the broker can impress his prospects with his ability to manipulate software and the databases, so important in today’s world, he hardly has to add that he has expertise in the brokerage field. He could not have developed the software in the first place were he not expert in direct mail!
A fourth is simply to advertise the personality of the brokerage house’s owner. Brokerage house presidents have such distinctive personalities, being both entrepreneurial and mercurial, that they draw a good deal of comment in the industry. A smart house can take advantage of this.
There are other identity types, of course, and there are advantages and disadvantages to each promotional plan.
Of course, once having advertised itself as a specialist in the vertical area, the broker has to prove it in some way. I will discuss this as well as the various promotional strategies in the conclusion of this two-part series.
Bob Castle is a marketing and technology consultant in the direct response business.
