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O P I N I O N
Low-hanging fruit
Cross-marketing is the low-hanging fruit of business development. But will it work for your firm?
C ross-marketing can be an important and highly useful tool in your arsenal. It can be mutually beneficial to you and your clients, saving you both time and money. However, it’s not an effective strategy for every company or situation. How can you know if cross-marketing will be beneficial for your firm? And if so, how can you implement it?
Berry Still
Before we get into the mechanics of cross- marketing, we need to first assess if your company is well positioned to cross-market. For this purpose, diversity and culture are going to be key. If you have no diversity in services, clients, or geography, you have nothing to cross-market – and nobody to cross-market to. Likewise, if your firm lacks a “one-company” culture, staff will be reluctant to spend their time and effort cross-marketing because they will not see how it benefits them. To get people excited about cross-marketing, they need to have the mindset that strengthening one facet of a company strengthens the company as a whole. A company that operates in silos, where every market essentially exists in its own little world, cannot accomplish this.
So, to assess whether your company is positioned to cross-market, ask yourself a couple basic questions: ❚ ❚ Do you have a diversity of service lines, clients (private/public), or geography? ❚ ❚ Does your firm promote a “one-company” philosophy and culture in which all employees can see how they would benefit from cross-marketing? If your answer is no to either of these questions, your cross-marketing efforts will most likely be unsuccessful. After you’ve evaluated your company and determined you’re well positioned to successfully cross-market, what’s next? You have two options:
See BERRY STILL, page 4
THE ZWEIG LETTER February 24, 2020, ISSUE 1333
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