How to Resonate with Corporate Clients

This week’s conversation is about how to create emotional resonance when your target audience is a large corporation. When I was starting my company based in New York City, I never thought of myself as a small business. We happened to be an extremely small business and when we started, we started in the kitchen of a loft in Tribeca on Leonard street. Our customers were in food, drug, and pharmaceuticals. We had one and a half people helping us at the time. I’d say when I started my business I was clueless and I was, but when I approached our companies, we talked about the problem that we solved and we always talked about the solution that would be present for their department or for their division of that corporation after having gone through our services.

Create Emotional Resonance with the People at Corporations

Let’s say you’re pitching a large corporation and you say “How do I resonate with people who tend to think of the corporation as a thing, and not a person?” There’s two things I can say. One is that division, that department, that corporation that you are communicating to, you are talking to a person. There is a person that is trying to solve a business problem and is interested in your services. It’s no different than talking to a small business owner or talking to someone in a retail store and asking them, “What do you really want? What are you trying to achieve by picking out this gorgeous dress? What are the goals?” It’s the same in a corporation. The decision maker has a tough problem on their hands and they are trying to solve it, so you can relate to the problem and then you can connect emotionally and resonate based on the emotional tenants that are in that conversation. You need to get crystal clear on what are they shooting for. Have those meaningful conversations, finding out what are they struggling with, what are their challenges and what problem are they trying to solve and what would be possible for the department when they did solve that problem. In there, if you listen, they are going to give you the emotional tenants of that issue or that situation for the corporation.

Research Corporate Initiatives

The second thing is corporations have initiatives. Managers and departments are dealing with things that are currently in play. Leaders of the corporation are dealing with future focused goals. They are not dealing with solving problems of today or cleaning up issues from the past. They are shifting their focus from the past or the present to the future. What you can do is do some light research by Googling articles about them, looking for the trends, looking at what they are focused on for the next two, three and five years out. Also, go to their corporate website. Very often, right on their homepage in the basic navigation, there is access to what are the corporate initiatives, what are the philosophies for the corporations, what are they committed to. What are they committed to and advancing their employees? How do they handle talent retention or growing their people? When you start reading the content or listening to the video’s that are on their website, you’ll start to be able to hear where the connection, where the emotional resonance lives. When you then approach that corporation, you demonstrate that you’ve done some research, you are aware of what the corporate goals are for the future and how you can best align to help them see that solution happen with your partnership.
Research first! Find out the corporation's initiatives so you know what's important to them. Click To Tweet

Kerri Konik is a seasoned senior branding executive who has committed her focus and expertise to bringing big agency strategies to business owners and entrepreneurs to achieve next level growth. Kerri is the CEO of her 5th venture, Brandscape Atelier, a women-owned boutique agency specializing in strategic branding for small business. They develop brand strategy, identity, messaging and marketing that ignites emotional connection, increases sales, drives growth and profits, resulting in sustainability and achieving a greater impact in the world.