You are currently browsing the Technology Tenant Tribulations weblog archives for the day April 6, 2007.
April 6, 2007 by jack petrie.
CRESA Partners’ client Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source recently contributed two articles to MediaPost’s Email Insider on the lack of passion among email marketers:
http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=394
http://blogs.mediapost.com/email_insider/?p=398
They got me thinking about being a service professional and how a little dose of passion can be quite a differentiator.
Bill laments the lack of industry evangelists in his profession. I believe commercial real estate, like email marketing, gets a similar bad rap. I can sometimes see the physical response from people when I introduce myself and tell them what I do. But you know what, I’m passionate about what I do and see myself as an industry evangelist. To describe it succinctly:
“I help companies control occupancy costs”.
The other point that Bill touches on are the virtues of specialization. In real estate, too many firms and advisors play both sides of the fence. One day (or minute) they’re representing a landlord, the next day they’re putting on their “tenant broker” hat and trying to pretend they can do both things well. Well, you know what, they can’t. There aren’t enough hours in the day. And there is an inherent conflict of interest in playing both sides of the real estate field.
Specialization runs deeper and being an expert in a specific industry (i.e., technology) is even more challenging. Many professionals have a bunch of clients in a particular industry, call it a practice group and provide the same “cookie cutter” solutions to each client. To truly understand an industry, you have to live in their space, understand their business, attend their industry events, know who’s whom and get inside their minds.
It’s a huge time commitment and again, there aren’t enough hours in the day. But the end result is a reputation as a service provider who truly “gets it”. And that reputation creates “buzz” and word-of-mouth referrals. And you have to be passionate to pull it off.
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