I read a quote the other day from marketing pundit Seth Godin: “Don’t find customers for products, build products for customers.”
This got me thinking about artists, designers and other creatives. Isn’t that what they do?
They get work by doing great work and earning and cultivating a reputation.
People then seek them out, and the resulting collaboration is a custom-designed sculpture, house, video, portrait.
Well, isn’t logistics art?
You can’t hang it on a wall, but it’s art just the same. The solution reflects your unique take on the interplay of people, process and systems for a particular set of factors.
So if logistics is art, can we learn anything from how artists, designers and other creatives get new business?
The architect with a vision for creating non-traditional, collaborative work spaces on a large scale is not hiring a telesales company to try and get her sales appointments. She’s busy owning her vision – conceiving and creating great work spaces and sharing that vision, and her work, with the world. That’s how she markets. She hopes her approach will resonate with a select few companies that will seek her out in order to build something great.
Like this architect, you ideally want to be on the receiving end of sales calls, instead of relying on annoying and interruptive outbound calls and emails to scare up prospects.
To do that, you need to own your own vision.
Ask yourself these questions:
- For what particular set of customers is my company building its product?
- What’s our perspective on the challenges they face?
- What’s our unique take on how to solve for these challenges?
- What examples are there of successful applications of this approach?
The answers to these questions could be a blog post, a feature story in a magazine, a slide presentation, a speech at a conference, a case study, a podcast, a video….
It’s not enough to think it; share it.
Become an evangelist. Not to everyone. Just to the select group for which you’re art is most relevant.
Free eBook:
Lead Generation for Logistics Services: Who's Job Is It, Anyway?
During a phone discussion on marketing with the senior executive of a large, warehouse-based logistics firm, I shared my perspective that many such companies make salespeople work too hard to unearth sales opportunities. After a brief silence, the executive said, tersely, “That’s what I pay them for.”
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