Kent 2020 was on 7th April and the local polls are on 5th May. One was a business exhibition and the other decides who gets voted in to the local councils. You might think there are no similarities between the two events but there are.
Local Elections
Out of the woodwork come a string of canvassers and people who want to secure our vote. All smiles, promises, and leaflets. Invisible for ages to the majority of households where they go door knocking, they appear to rise from the ground like political zombies when the time comes to secure a vote. They may as well be saying “you may vaguely recognise my name and although I’ve made no effort to nurture you in the past, can I count on your vote?”
Kent 2020
A day in which companies put themselves on display. Again, all smiles, promises, and leaflets (with a sprinkling of freebies). They want one thing: business, or the opportunity for future business. Many of the people the exhibitors meet will have been previously unknown to them. Within a few months those exhibitors will have a feeling about whether exhibiting at Kent 2020 was good for them. Many exhibitors were effectively saying “we’re here, come and talk and then buy from us”.
The similarities
The local politicians and many of the exhibitors at Kent 2020 have one particular thing in common: they believe that their sudden visibility is going to make us buy from them. They have little concept that a relationship needs to be built.
Before Kent 2020, we at Custwin decided to make assessments of those exhibitors we met. We were particularly interested in how many of them would offer us the opportunity to go on something like an email newsletter list, which would allow us to get a better feel for their company, over a period of time. We spoke to numerous new people during the day and the end result was:
Zero offers of email newsletters.
We’d expected to get perhaps 5% but 0% didn’t seem possible. Walking round the exhibition meeting people we’d never met before, our (kept to ourselves) attitude was:
“We may not need your services right now but maybe in the future we may do, or more likely, may be able to refer your services onto people we know who have such a need”.
If we had been offered email newsletters then over a longer period of time there would have been the opportunity to build trust. It would cost the exhibitors nothing to put us on a list and maybe just a bit of effort to analyse how well we interact with the email newsletters being sent out.
As we went round the exhibition we bumped into people we knew (well, it’s hard not to!) and had several complimentary (thank you) comments about our own email newsletter. People we’d not seen for ages, but who receive our newsletters, knew what we were all about – there had been an element of trust built. I’ve said before that without fail we gain at least one new client a month because the trust has been built up via the email newsletters.
Back to the local elections, how different would it be if those who want our votes had some form of interaction with us on a more regular basis? It could be via electronic means (e.g. an email newsletter from time to time) or it could be in other forms. It would help us to get a better feel for the people and how they would represent us and ultimately, their lives leading up to polling day would be made a lot easier because they’d have a better feeling for who’s ‘onside’.
If a local politician and a typical business exhibitor were in stands next to each other at Kent 2020, they would currently have equal opportunity to succeed or fail. But if one of them found a way to more regularly interact with their potential ‘clients’ and considered the long-term game, they would ultimately be more successful.
Before there’s a huge fury that every Kent 2020 exhibitor is being tarred with the same brush, it has to be said that some exhibitors may have had a more long-term approach. It was just that we didn’t see any evidence of it. Yes, some may have taken business cards and put us on various lists without us being aware, but there was no proactive discussion such as “can we put you on our email newsletter list so that you can be kept aware of what we’re doing in the future?”.
For all those who, in the coming months, will be doing a post-mortem of their Kent 2020 ‘results’, I say “if they weren’t great, come back again next year with something that will build trust over a longer period of time”.
To those local politicians who don’t do so well in the local elections I say “find ways to build up trust over a longer period of time instead of assuming that people will instantly support someone who has been practically invisible for so long”.