The reason why you hear crickets when you reach out to corporate prospects might have little to do with your offer, your credentials, or even that claim that “it’s hard to sell to corporates”.
=> The more likely reason is that you are not clear in your message of what challenges you can help them with and HOW. <=
Yes, I know, it’s an unpopular opinion…
Because everyone tells you that it’s the results (aka the WHAT) that sells and that clients don’t care about HOW you achieve those results.
The problem with focussing on the “what”
But this actually misses the important point that if you don’t give your prospects a clue on the broad approach of how you can help them deal with their issue, you leave it up to them to imagine how you do that.
So for example, if you help to improve internal communication between teams, they might picture boring classroom-based training sessions.
Or if you talk about empowering female leaders to break through the male-dominated industry biases, they might be imagining cringy roleplaying sessions.
Or if you’re a wellness coach, they might think you’ll make them sit in the lotus position, meditating for 60 mins.
And while training, role-play and meditating can all be great, corporate people often picture it in their mind as delivered in a way that doesn’t fit into their culture or is less than enticing for another reason, so they are quick to reject you outright.
Therefore, it is important to give your prospects an idea of HOW you help them with their issues or achieve their goals so that they will talk to you.
Something to bare in mind
Now, this is where confusion can arise.
Just because I said you should give them an idea of HOW you deliver your work, I don’t mean you should bore them with all the features of your offer.
There is a difference between the concept and approach you use vs the detailed features of your program (which, by the way, should be tailored to your specific prospects’ needs).
The concept might for example say that you use a modular approach, where each element builds on the previous one and gives an idea of why each module is valuable.
The features would be things like the number of sessions, the exact tools, and the exercises you’ll use.
Benefits of focussing on the “how”
When you are being clear in your messaging, not just on WHAT you can help a large business with but also give a succinct summary of HOW you do that, you are doing something very rare in the industry and that gets people’s attention in a world where everyone is just vague.
Doing this you should see a marked increase in responses, especially quality responses to your corporate outreach activities.
