Churches are taking these two weeks to prepare for their next big push — to connect with those who visited during Christmas and are checking them out again. They put on their A-game for Christmas, but they’ve got to keep the excellence factor high every weekend, and the AVL technology is playing an increasingly important part in both the production aspect, but also in the environmental (experience) ambiance of the church.

During these same two weeks, your marketing and sales teams need to be warming up the promotions and invites to webinars, roundtables and free PDF downloads that speak directly to creating great guest experiences at churches everywhere. The beginning of a new year also starts with new budgets, a keen awareness of last year’s technological pain points and a new desire to make upgrades and changes.

Sure, you can always blast out new promotions, sales and spew forth more sales slicks, but I implore you to think differently about how you speak to — and with — the House of Worship market in the new year. Create conversations via social media, make users heroes in stories about their churches and provide more useful content (not sales slicks, by the way) that helps them understand how to leverage your technology solutions and systems in the context of their unique needs. Re-introduce your team members (not just your products) to your previous church clients, extend an invite to attend the next tradeshow and include those golden tickets to the off-the-floor demo rooms and after parties. Build rapport early and often, and the sales and referrals will follow.

Be different from your competition by sharing your unique value proposition for church clients. Help them see what’s in it for them! Take this new year as an opportunity to redefine your approach to the House of Worship market. You’ll find that come this time next year, you’ll be working with more churches than ever before if you’ll speak with them and not at them.

Blessings on a new year,

Anthony