We get many calls from corporate wellness businesses looking for sales, marketing and lead generation help.
Some we can help–and many, we can’t.
The foundation of a successful business is not something you can pay a consulting firm to do for you.
Entrepreneurs have to lay the foundation for their first, small house themselves. Then we can help you build additions to that house that take your wellness business to the next level.
These are the building blocks you need to market and sell to corporate wellness prospects:
1. Actual Conversations with Prospective Clients
If your business asks us for help generating leads or marketing your programs, the first thing we’re going to ask you are questions like these:
- what’s top of mind for your target customer?
- what problems do they want to solve?
- what have they tried that didn’t work?
- what’s keeping them up at night?
- what worries them?
- how would they define success?
We can’t tell you these answers about your potential clients because we don’t know them and haven’t talked to them. Yes, we know about lots of OTHER wellness providers, but every company’s strategy and product positioning are different, and the way their customers think is different.
YOU have to know how your customers think. That is your job, as a leader in your business.
Plus, there’s nearly always a vast gap between how YOU think they think, and what’s really in their heads. The only way to get yourself back to reality is to talk to them.
And you definitely shouldn’t hire outside sales and marketing help until you’ve tried selling your programs and services yourself.
So many people tell me that their plan is to hire a company to make lead generation cold calls for them–they will just “tell the lead gen firm what the key points are” and let them make the calls that they’re afraid to make. (Hey, let’s be honest here.)
But how can you tell THEM what to say and do, if you’ve never talked to potential customers yourself? At best, you’re telling them what you hope, imagine and dream potential customers want. (In fact, we call it “smoking your own hope.”) It’s the blind leading the blind.
2. At Least One Case Study
If you have actual, successful customers, and you just need help WRITING the case study, we can help you.
If you don’t HAVE a single real customer, or a single successful customer, we cannot help you.
What to do if you’re a new business? This one’s easy. Do a small free or heavily-discounted pilot with a business that’s as similar as possible to your target customer and then write up the pilot as a case study.
If you’re so underfunded that you can’t even manage a small free pilot, you need to free up funds or rethink your business altogether. Selling to businesses is not quick, and it will take investment in sales and marketing.
Employers want evidence that your program is well-put-together and likely to be helpful to their employees. They are not going to take your word for it.
They also want evidence that your business knows the ropes – that your team will work well with their employees, that you understand how businesses work and know how to play nicely with HR and the internal wellness department, and so on.
3. Customer References
You don’t have to have lots – but you do need at least a few. If you have successful customer experiences and you’re just not quite sure how to get the references, or how best to use them – we can help.
But if you don’t actually have successful customer experiences, we can’t help you. You have to crack the code on figuring out what your customers want, and delivering it with quality, yourself.
Then we can help you bootstrap those small successes into many more wins, and much bigger ones.
4. Core Marketing Materials
I’m not talking about a website or webpage with a high-faluting fancy-shmancy brain dump of glittering generalities about your corporate wellness programs.
This is hardcore marketing with business- and program-specific details: Brochures. Product sell sheets. Frequently-asked questions. Case studies. Competitive comparisons. Buying guides. Readiness checklists. And so on.
These we can create for you, again assuming that #1, #2 and #3 above are in place. If those steps haven’t happened yet, it’s premature to worry about this step.
5. A Relationship Sales Plan
I talked to someone in Dallas recently who wanted to buy a list of HR directors he could call. Of course, getting the list is easy. So I asked him what he planned to do with them or to them after he called, since they certainly weren’t going to buy on the spot. Dead silence.
Corporate sales is a progressive, phased relationship sale. Employers do not buy employee wellness programs based on a single phone call from a stranger. Ever.
So you need tailored content and sales/marketing activities that specifically target each phase and help walk the prospect forward to the next step. There’s not much point in spending time and money on hundreds of phone calls or thousands of direct-mail postcards if you don’t have a plan for what happens next.
This is an area where we can help, if the other building blocks are in place and now you need help figuring out the sales plan that takes you to the next level.
