The missing link
By Andrew Shedden
My clients continuously amaze me with the quality of products and services found within their businesses. They offer great value, state of the art engineering, stringent quality control, clever computer programming, thoughtful design, and top all of this off with amazing customer service. Unfortunately they discover this seldom helps them grow their businesses. In fact all of this isn’t enough.
Whether in manufacturing or other forms of business to business sales eventually all of them discover the truth of the following statement: “Build it and they will come” may work in the movies but certainly doesn’t work in the world of business.
Most businesspeople know that some form of marketing materials and promotion are necessary to bring a steady flow of qualified sales leads into their businesses. What they don’t know is why standard practices rarely, if ever, work. While marketing materials are great they aren’t enough.
How to burn your money
Many business professionals are dedicated to promoting their companies through persuasive marketing communications. They spend thousands of dollars on brochures, web sites, direct mail and other forms of top quality marketing collateral. They have the most beautiful, customer-centric, and benefit focused marketing materials you can buy.
They craft their sales letters, stuff their envelopes, rent their highly targeted lists, send out their mailings, and get virtually no response. They become very discouraged, write off direct mail as a viable prospecting tool, and store their remaining marketing materials in a supply closet. These business professionals - quite rightly - begin to wonder why they spent the money in the first place. Some feel like they’ve burned their money, and they have.
Why does this happen?
Response rates have plummeted in all types of media and won’t be increasing anytime soon. This can be attributed to the fact that every market is inundated with advertising messages. We’re living in a vastly over-communicated society. Minutes are being sliced out of classic movies being aired on television to squeeze in more advertising. There are over a million web sites created worldwide every month. We’re exposed to piles of direct mail containing appeals for our money and demanding our attention. There are advertisements in public bathrooms, and on the fruit found in grocery stores. It never ends.
The best way to attract qualified prospects
As some of you may know from my past newsletters, I believe the strongest marketing strategy to be used in any business is to offer free problem solving information first as a way of attracting prospects. I haven’t seen this strategy fail in any type of business. You’re probably also aware that I’m not much of a fan of institutional advertising and strongly advocate direct mail for prospecting purposes. But sending out a direct mail piece isn’t enough.
What you need to do
All of your marketing communications tactics must be based on greater quantities of repetition. In fact, now more than ever it’s imperative to have multiple touches, as the majority of your communications won’t reach your intended target.
There used to be a rule of thumb that stated it took 7 to 10 messages (touches) to a single prospect before your business would even begin to be noticed. I recently listened to a business coach being interviewed in which he stated the latest research shows that 2 out of every 3 marketing messages aren’t being noticed. This means that instead of 7 to 10 touches you might need to be sending out 21 to 30 messages to even begin to get noticed.
I can tell you that we find this to be true in our own marketing activities. When we follow up on the phone it’s amazing how many people on our mailing lists say they didn’t get our direct mail prospecting pieces. This can be disheartening but is totally understandable. The key point to remember is while increased repetition in direct mail is important it’s not enough.
The missing link
Direct mail is great way to prospect if you can afford to send out massive mailings. After all, if you’re sending out 25,000 pieces of direct mail each month even if a small percentage of recipients call you you’re generating a lot of prospects.
If, however, your business is on a somewhat limited promotional budget, or in a small market which limits you to small mailings, direct mail will generate nothing but headaches and disappointment. Harsh, but true.
The missing link for success couldn’t be simpler - get on the phone and follow up. That’s the magical answer and one that will never fail. We follow up every prospect mailing we do by attempting to contact the decision makers (our target) on the phone at least once, and usually a couple of times. This gives us great results and if they say they didn’t receive our direct mail piece it gives us the opportunity to resend it.
What if you can’t?
Many clients tell me that they would rather drive nails into their heads than make a follow up call. I understand them feeling this way, as I personally don’t like making follow up calls. The solution couldn’t be easier, all you need to do is find a reliable outbound telemarketing company to make your follow up calls.
One common (and specious) objection I constantly hear to outsourcing follow up calls is, “What we sell is too technical. I couldn’t train telemarketers to sell my products and services.” This objection only makes sense if selling your product or service by follow up call on the phone is what you normally do. While this does happen in some businesses it seldom happens in business to business sales.
It’s absurd to think that you’d make a follow up call in which you sold a complex item with a single follow up phone call. If it did happen I suppose the opening line would be as such, “Hi my name is John Smith and my company makes a web based software program written in C++ that allows you to manage your inventory to 26 decimal places in up to 36,432 locations. Our programs typically range from $50,000 to $750,000, how many would you like to buy today?”
If you’re a smart marketer (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) selling in the business to business marketplace it’s a fairly sure bet that you’re probably following up to an information request or mailing in which you’ve offered something of value for free. This changes the dynamic of the follow up call.
Calls being made on your behalf would be presented like this “Hi, I’m calling on behalf of John Smith. Over the last few weeks he’s sent you some post cards and a sales letter offering you some free reports on our inventory control package and a free telephone consultation. I’m calling to see if you’d be interested in having John contact you to discuss your needs in more detail.”
In most instances you shouldn’t be trying to have telemarketers sell anything other than your free report or consultation. This hardly makes it difficult for them to represent your company with the highest levels of integrity and professionalism. Once they’ve identified interested prospects then have your technical person follow up on the lead to answer the questions and solidify the relationship.
When using direct mail for prospecting we always personally handle the initial responses from our mailing ourselves. These first responses are the prime leads ready to talk to a technical person. Every non-responding company is followed up with our outsourced telemarketers.
By mailing in smaller quantities and following up we always come up with many more valuable leads than we’d receive by only mailing and make our prospecting programs more profitable. Do thou the same.
