By C.J. Hayden, MCC

"What consumers are primarily interested in today are not features, but relationships." -- Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible

How many times already today has someone tried to sell you something? The ads come in by email, postal mail, fax, radio, magazines, newspapers, TV, and your web browser; the salespeople write you, call you, and approach you in the store or showroom. Are you even listening any more? How often do you actually buy something because someone you didn't know tried to sell it to you?

Your clients -- consumers and businesses alike -- are just like you. They are not only fed up with hype, most of the time they don't even see it. Overwhelmed with communications, they tune out the vast majority of the marketing messages they are presented with, just in order to get through their day. After attending a race plastered with Coca-Cola logos, a survey revealed that only a third of the attendees could remember who was the corporate sponsor.

"A weekday edition of The New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in 17th-century England." -- R.S. Wurman, Information Anxiety

Making information available to your clients is still important, so don't throw out your brochures or take down your website. But with so many communications arriving all the time, your clients want control over how and when they receive your information. More than ever before, people want to do business with people they know, like, and trust.

As the principal of a service business, what you are really marketing is you, not the service. When you are the product, your customers need to know who you are. They want to feel a connection with you, and know that they can trust you, before they will consider doing business with you.

"Beleaguered by e-mail spam and intrusive pop-up ads on the Internet, consumers are using the 'delete' button with increasing frequency and losing confidence in other traditional forms of advertising as well... Consumers rank word-of-mouth recommendations from others as the most trusted form of advertising." -- PlanetFeedback.com