Better to be hunted than hunt. Better to let people buy than to sell. I could go on with more lame metaphors, but the point I want to make is that – creating an information rich, education based marketing machine and putting it in the way of ideal prospects is the surest long term marketing momentum generating strategy. (By the way, the Internet is the greatest small business enabler of this strategy ever created.)

In other words, don’t simply go out and try to find new customers, set your marketing strategies and tactics up in a way that allow your ideal prospects to find you and decide for themselves that you have the perfect solution for them. Done properly you can literally do away with a selling mentality. This strategy, however must pervade every tactic you employ – your ads, your PR, your referrals, your lead nurturing, your lead conversion, even your customer service.

There are a couple reasons why this is so important.

1) It’s just a whole lot more fun to pick up the phone and have someone on the other end go on about all the great things they have read, seen and heard about your products and services.
2) (And I think this is a really big point) Prospects that come to you by way of your information machine, that have logically progressed down a path of education, are probably ten times more likely to be ideal and equally more likely to close than those that you go out and try to convince to buy from you. In fact, your marketing system can be one of the greatest ways to qualify leads – if a lead won’t go down your education path, that might be a red flag that they won’t be an ideal customer either.

This strategy, or way of doing business really, takes much more work – I mean, you have to write white papers, hold workshops, blog for heaven’s sake – but the payoff for your business is substantial. This strategy also requires much more patience as you may need to wait for your bait to be digested, test the best ways to move people to education, and gently drip progressive amounts of new information rather than just making a few more cold calls each day.

If you plan to be in business more than a few months than start today to build a marketing system that allows you to be found by your ideal prospects and give up the “hunting tactic of the week” mentality.