Chicago: Doing it Our Way

When you’re new to Chicago, one of the first things you think of is Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town,” his personal ode to the city. Next, of course, are the sites—the Sears Tower, the Navy Pier, Wrigley Field, and all the rest—but then it comes time to get down to business. Everything that’s Chicago reminds me of why Native Rank opened an office here, which is take our national service, and make it work locally.

Let’s say you have a bakery with the best bagels in the city, and while your near customer base knows all about you, your greater neighborhood does not. You build a website. You build a Facebook page and have all your friends “like” it. Your might even blog once in a while, post photos of onion bagels on Pinterest, and send something out on Twitter.

But do a Google search on best Chicago bagels, and your business comes up….well, someplace. But it’s not on the first couple of pages. How can you compete with the likes of, say, Noah’s Bagels or Einstein’s?

By having local sales representatives, we are able to meet face to face with local businesses, learn their needs, and correlate them with the possibilities available with really good local search engine optimization at an affordable cost. If you want to sell local, you have to be local.

We recognize there are significant costs involved in opening offices in cities where we think we can be successful, but we don’t think we can handle customer inquiries with autorespond emails or a call center somewhere. We think that to do it right, you have to be there.

"My Kind of Town"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f18ga0i6r2A 

It's All Local

I guess I can’t fault Amazon and all the other online companies for bombarding me with emails on the tech bazaar out there of things to buy, nor could I criticize booking a flight on Travelocity. But what I will say is that selling this way would never work for Native Rank. The product we deliver isn’t for a statistical user out there someplace. It’s for real people whose business or profession has unique needs.

I can’t count the number of times older people in sales have told me, “It’s all about relationships, Kid,” but you know what? It really is. Allstate Insurance is a great company, but what makes it work are the thousands of agents from Chicago to Chico, all of whom have their own clients with their homes and their cars with distinctly personal needs. The relationship between the agent and the client makes the whole company tick.

Sometimes, it seems as though face-to-face meetings has become a lost art. Make a presentation online or as an email attachment, and not only does the customer lose the opportunity to ask questions, but you lose out on the ability to tailor the product.  It becomes too easy for the customer to say no by hitting the delete button, and you both lose. My grandfather said that salesmanship begins when the customer says no, and if they say it by email, the door to discussion is closed.

Face-to-face meetings are even more critical when the marketing problems you’re trying to solve are local. We have a good-sized, busy office in Denver, CO, but what does that mean to a Chevrolet dealer in Plano, TX? Their customers are local, their problems are unique to them, and so are their solutions. How can you ever know unless you sit across the table and ask? The only way to build a sustainable relationship is to be there and show up.

Through LinkedIn, among others, we’ve developed a promising network in Denver Metro that gets larger every week, and we couldn’t have done it without meeting and talking to people in person.  Native Rank’s customer base has grown right along with it, and it’s safe to say that if we saw future customers as statistics or averages, we wouldn’t be where we are, and more important, where we’re going.