Working with people

In February we came up with a business development idea which we thought would be interesting to a number of colleagues working in the south-east. We created an offer for their clients which would be almost risk-free for them - we have got limited capacity to do this type of work so we will pre-qualify hard to make sure that what we take on will work well.

We put together a training session to set out some of our thinking and describe the promotion so that we would leave attendees with something, even if we didn't have the capacity to go ahead with their clients straight away. We were sure that by positioning the session as training, we would develop a group of eager advocates who would refer us to their friends. We sent out a promotional email which produced a good number of cheques in the post.

Not everyone read the email in the same way - it's that psychology word again. It just shows how important it is to put yourself in the readers' eyes every time you develop a piece of copy.

• Marketing