Insurance
Reeling them in
How to pull customers toward your business
By Matt McClellan
Smart Business St. Louis | May 2008
Bert Schweizer III
Principal, Buckingham Family of Financial Services
Bert Schweizer III set up a
“pull marketing” plan at
Buckingham Family of Financial Services for one simple reason: He didn’t like making cold calls.
Schweizer, one of four founding principals at Buckingham,
realized in 2003 that pushing the
investment firm wasn’t the best
way to develop new prospects.
Instead, he discovered that if
the company was regarded as
an expert in its field, customers
would come on their own.
In the next three years, the company grew revenue to $40 million — a 151 percent increase in
revenue from 2003 to 2006.
Smart Business spoke with
Schweizer about how to pull
customers to you by establishing yourself as an expert in your
market.
Q. How do you position the
firm as an expert in its field?
One technique we use for pull
marketing is writing books. One
of our principals authors books
on investment topics. Then, those
books are promoted through a
public relations approach of getting the author interviewed in
the print media and broadcast
media, radio and television.
We do a lot of writing of articles for newspaper columns. So
we do a lot of writing; then try
to get those articles published.
Third, we have been successful at cultivating relationships
with other financial reporters in
the local newspapers but also in
trade magazines in the industry.
These relationships contact us
periodically, if not for specific
articles they want to do, at least
for commentary.
Another strategy we’ve begun
to develop the last couple years is creating white papers. This is
original material that we develop that is designed to talk about
subjects for specific groups.
Looking at niches like that and
developing white papers along
those niches is a way of positioning yourself as an expert.
Q. What are the advantages
of cultivating relationships
with the media?
The most important one is that
relationship can lead to your
name and, more importantly,
your firm name appearing
in print. By appearing in
print, it develops not just
recognition on a more
consistent basis by potential prospects, but it also
leads to our appearance
to a group who may not
know of us as an expert
in an area in which they’re
looking for solutions.
Q. How do you cultivate relationships with
your clients?
It begins from the first
introduction to the prospect. We initiate a program that we call ‘discovery.’ ... We go through discovery to really learn from
that first meeting with a prospect
of what’s important to them.
We really probe. When we first
meet with a prospect, it’s all
about us asking questions about
what’s important to that prospect.
That is the way we’ve found to
be successful to immediately
establishing that relationship.
That’s in contrast to what
we first did when we began
Buckingham. The first thing we
did when we met a prospect
was all about telling them how
smart we were.
We’ve turned that around. In many ways, our pull marketing
strategy has already established
that we know what we’re talking about.
It’s like going to the doctor.
When you go to the doctor, do
you go there and question his
ability to give medical advice very
often? No, you already believe
he’s an expert in health care,
and he will have the answers.
What you want to do is hopefully have him ask you, ‘What’s
bothering you?’ And, ‘Tell me
more about it so I can help
solve your problem.’
They don’t spend time telling
you where they went to medical
school and how much training
they had in their specialty. We’re
the same way. We’ve turned it around and now we approach it
much more like the medical
service industry would. We’ve
found we don’t need to tell you
that we’re smart guys, especially
if someone referred you here.
The person referring you probably already said, ‘These are
smart guys. They know what
they’re talking about.’
That’s where it begins and that’s
where it differs from the strategy
of how we began doing this 13
years ago. It starts with developing that relationship upfront.
Q. How do you maintain relationships with your clients?
The really important key to
maintaining that relationship is
contact. We have a systematic
program that is designed to try
to have 28 contacts a year with
our clients.
It sounds like a lot, but a contact can be an e-mail, a face-to-face meeting, receiving our
newsletter, having a client
appreciation event, sending a
card on their birthday or, if
they’re going on a cruise, having
a gift certificate in their cabin
they can use.
Q. How does maintaining
contact with clients benefit
the firm?
The key benefits are that it
helps accomplish what we want,
which is maintaining a long-term
relationship with our clients,
and, secondly, it shows we really care about them, in more
ways than just how their investment portfolio may be doing.
It’s that caring, that client-first
attitude, that helps the client
feel good about referring their
friends, family and colleagues to
us.
HOW TO REACH: Buckingham Family of Financial Services, (314) 725-0455 or www.bamstl.com
