People buy from people – are yours hidden away?

Its an old adage that people buy from people – at the recent SAP Field Kick Of Meeting, Bill McDermott made the observation that SAP’s people and the relationships they build with customers are a major factor in the resurgence of SAP’s sales results, even ahead of the full recovery from the Global Financial Crisis.

However, a lot of the marketing efforts I see across the world (and in SAP Partners) really hides the people behind those businesses away until they start engaging face to face with customers.

Even the ubiquitous About Us links tend to talk about “the team” or “our people” without calling out who they are, what makes them worthy of a potential customers hard earned dollars and what the value is that each person can bring to the table.

Maybe the executive team is mentioned in very “corporate terms” but its hard to really get a feel for the organisation until the face to face engagement starts.

So, I would like to encourage you to bring your people front and center – even to the point of replacing some of those stock photos that you have on your web sites and brochures with pictures of real people – real employees, real customers, real users of the solution – at the very least, you will start to differentiate your business from all the others as friendly, approachable and populated with real human beings!

If you subscribe to the concept that marketing is about getting people with a need for your product or service to know, like and trust you, then I am sure you’ll agree that this is a great way to start to build that trust by putting your people up front.

You can even utilise video to film a short video bio of each of your team members and put that on to your web site and start incorporating the pictures of your presenters in your webinar slides, letters and emails. I would even suggest you try to find someone in your organisation who can become the face of the company – dont underestimate how the consistent appearance of key people in your digital marketing can help build trust in your organisation.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this topic – has it worked for you going down this path, what are your concerns with this approach – and of course if you would like assistance deploying an approach like this please feel free to reach out to me.