Generosity as a Marketing Tool

Twinning Strategy's Episode 21, we had guest Becky Robinson, CEO and founder of Weaving Influence and Author of Reach , to talk about how to amplify your marketing strategy with generosity. Becky's take, give as much as you can to create that human relationship that is increasingly important to potential clients. From her perspective in the book promotion world, it is hard to give a way too much. Do you risk putting all your content and value on-line for free? The conclusion in our discussion is that, no, the value is in the aggregate of that information, e.g. the book pulls it all together into one place. Beyond the centralization in the product, the value you bring becomes the expertise that enables the book, the ideas you developed in writing and thinking about the book, and the deep thought and experience you gain in your area of expertise as you help new clients. As the title of David Sandler's book aptly states, 'You Can't Teach a Kid to Ride a Bike at a Seminar', likewise you can't develop deep understanding of book publishing or leadership training or biotech experimental approaches from reading a book. 

In practice, this means that giving away your ideas is the means to create the value that your expertise brings and that you can ultimately capitalize on. As people interact with the social media content, videos, books, articles that you or your company produces, you begin to develop the connection and trust needed to sell your product. The client knows that you bring the value that you promise. Devoting your a larger fraction of your budget to a known quantity solves the difficult to overcome sales problem that as a founder you might be wasting your money on a dead-end, or as a leadership member that you fear making a costly, career killing mistake by choosing the wrong vendor. 

I asked Becky how to think about the limitations of generosity--can it go too far. It was a loaded question, as I have dealt with many people in my consulting and company growing experiences who are happy to keep pulling you into pre-contractual meetings to get the value without the cost. The verdict here in Becky's response is that you can be generous and still have boundaries. The insight she  brought up, which is definitely getting my brain spinning, is that generosity is best when it is closely tied to scalability. In other words, videos, books, articles, and digitally distributed content can provide a low-resource and (hopefully) high value win-win proposal for the expert and the prospect. "Get to know me better by learning how I think." In fact in Becky's book she talks about the idea that you can develop potentially dozens of pieces of shareable content from one article--turn it into audio, build a presentation around it and record it, build an info graphic, etc. 

In my experience, the relationships you build that demonstrate value lead to the longest and strongest client-vendor collaborations. In fact, the most lucrative of relationships are those that build over time. The generosity is an investment in the future of creating expansion opportunities and 'free' evangelism of your product by your happy clients. It is a longer game, but it creates an enticing upside.