subject: Direct Marketers Can Cultivate Better Clients This Way [print this page] Direct Marketers Can Cultivate Better Clients This Way
Many direct marketers use prospecting strategies that generate the incorrect prospective buyers (i.e. poor sales leads). I define an incorrect prospect as a person who's not truly interested, not qualified or difficult to cope with. Essentially, a person who wastes your precious time and, if they do grow to be a customer, they use up so much of your time that you wish they weren't a client.
You generate these ill-qualified prospects by making use of unfocused mass marketing and advertising approaches. As an example, should you telephone a list of individuals over age 65 attempting to obtain long-term care appointments, you're producing the wrong prospects. You've no proof if these men and women have an interest or are qualified. So you waste a great deal of time cold calling and then meeting folks who're not qualified or interested. I call this being a "sales laborer." You waste big quantities of time on non-revenue-generating activities.
With such untargeted marketing, you start the relationship by giving the power and control to the prospect. You begged them for an appointment. They are able to accept or decline and they've got the power. You are chasing them. Wouldn't you rather they chase you?
Would it be more clever should you only met with the engaged capable prospects and invested a lot more of your time in a sales presentations? Wouldn't it be much better should you attracted these interested folks to you and conducted yourself as a "sales professional" and not a sales laborer? Here's the key to bringing in qualified prospects and serious prospects: set up your prospecting system to ensure that prospects show their desire prior to you ever getting in touch with them. Let them to request your contact!
Instead of plowing through your suspect list, send a well-penned, direct response mailer. Even in the event you obtain a 1% response to 1,000 items mailed, that's 10 curious folks who took the right step. They contacted you and requested some action of you. You commence your sasles process in control of the relationship.
Whenever you call the prospect, you qualify them and remove say half from additional consideration. You get five meetings. These are the identical five appointments you'd have gotten with the cold calling, but see just how much less difficult this was. Rather than speaking with a thousand folks, you talked to 10 folks. Rather than meeting with 10 folks, you met with five. You saved perhaps twenty-five hours of your time and invested 500 dollars on postage and mailing. (Put simply, had you cold-called, you valued your time at $20 an hour for the mailing cost you saved. Is that all you're worth--$20 per hour)?
Since you now know that you'll be able to get a lot more appointments by sending direct mail, you'll not be so desperate for each appointment. You'll be able to qualify men and women well and get rid of those that have a small odds of becoming a client. You invest your time talking to the most promising prospects and your close percentage rises since you meet with a lot more qualified prospects.
In the event you ran an advertisement within the local senior magazine or on the web, "Avoid Errors in Acquiring Long-Term Care Insurance--Get the Free of charge Guide for Seniors." You then have respnding prospects to call who're engaged and motivated. You've saved your time and reduced the prospects you deal with to those that take initiative. These are the sorts of men and women you would like as clients. You don't want individuals who need to usually be convinced, which is the kind of prospect that's generated with unfocused, mass calling. Sales laborers invest time with prospects that want convincing. Sales Experts spend time in sales presentations with interested, determined prospects who take the initial step.
Or how about putting a flyer inerted into the daily newspaper for your next class?
Say it's an LTC seminar: "90% of Seniors Have Lacking Health Protection." In our tests, 10,000 inserted flyers into the main city newspaper (for about $500) produces 25 individuals to a seminar. You give a presentation to 25 inspired folks at one time and then have personal appointments. Seminars make extremely-efficient use of your time (you give the identical presentation at as soon as to 25 or much more individuals). Those who attend seminars are really motivated as they need to find the locaiton, get to the location on time, they had to schedule the activity on their schedule, get prepared, etc. Should you use classes to market your expertise, you'll generate really targeted prospects, a very high percent of which turn out to be clients.
If cost will be the hang-up to pursuing effective advertising as shown above, contemplate that you virtually insure that your earnings won't improve since you now throw away your selling time and effort on prospecting. Even when you have no cash accessible for advertising, take a $500 loan from your credit card. Not only can you produce a several-fold return on your investment, but you'll be encouraged to earn and pay off this advance prior to your credit card statement cming in the mail.
In the event you desire to be a huge producer, a quick approach would be to invest funds into your organization, not your time. Your time should be devoted to sales activities and absolutely nothing else. It is the model utilized by probably the most productive businesses in existence today-invest capital in advance and grow huge and profitable rapidly. Invest the cash to ensure that your time could be employed for appointments with qualified potential customers. As an excellent coach said to me, "You are required to put wood inside the fireplace first before it emits any heat."
If you've been tired of prospecting, got burnt out and really feel that excellent prospects are hard to find, see how the above ideas may be simply applied at ProspectMatch.
