Will You Marry Me?
Eventually.
Appeared November 27, 2003 in The Insurance
Record
Selling is a lot like marriage. It’s a
relationship where partners agree to work together. They form
similarly, too. A first date rarely ends with a marriage
acceptance. A first sales call gets similar results. A
marriage acceptance, like the sales process, takes time and requires
persistence. I recently heard James P. Cecil, a marketing
specialist, speak. He said that about 20% of prospects will never
buy. About 20% of prospects who inquire about your products or
services will buy something like it within 90 days. 19% will buy
within the first 6 months and 33% will finally make a purchase after 24
months. The problem with this is that the first contact has been
long forgotten when the customer is ready to buy.
Start a relationship. Sure it’s nice to find a buyer
with an immediate need for your products or services. Yet most buyers are
not the low hanging fruit. Since most buyers are later purchasers,
isn’t the best time to meet a prospective customer when they have a
serious and immediate need and when they already understand and prefer you
as their first choice provider? It’s your job to create that
interest. You do it with the strategy that Cecil developed called
“nurture marketing.” The basic premise is keeping in touch with the right
people at a meaningful level and on a regular basis.
How do I build a relationship? Letter writing is an
effective way to build a relationship with a prospect. Your
objective is to capture and hold your prospect’s attention. It
starts with getting your prospect to open the letter. You can do
this with a specially selected enclosure, something big enough to make the
envelope slightly bulge. You want the recipient to be curious about what’s
in the envelope. Ascendix Technologies, who sells customer
relationship and sales automation software, recently applied the
strategy. They mailed a letter to prospects who had attended a
nurture marketing seminar. In the envelope along with the letter
were pumpkin seeds. The letter content should create an awareness of
the problem you can solve. Wes Snow, Ascendix’ President, wrote
about prospects being like the pumpkin seeds that were enclosed.
They needed to be nurtured. He cited a statistic that 95% of all
companies identified as prospects by a sales rep simply vanish from the
reps call list. What also vanishes is the opportunity to develop a
long-term relationship.
Keep going. Always make your second contact with your
prospect an education-packed and a “nurturous” one. You’re not ready to
ask for anything from them at this point. Most likely they’re not
ready to give you any business either. Information and "them-serving"
knowledge-based enclosures tells them you are thinking of them. This
contact could include a reprint of an article about you or a topic you
think might particularly interest them. You could invite them to an
educational seminar to further get to know your prospects. This
might even be one your company presents. Snow will invite prospects
to future Business Boot Camp seminars that he hosts. You could also
introduce them to other prospects. Just make sure you are targeting
the right decision maker. It should be the one writing the
checks.
How do you know it’s working? Your prospects will call
you when your nurture marketing program is working. They call you
because they now trust you and they have a need. They also believe
you’re the best company to work with. Nurture marketing gives
prospects a preview of how they’re going to be treated as customers.
One company president who uses nurture marketing says, "It's treating
people the way you want to be treated, so that your clients say, 'This is
the kind of company I want to do business with.'" And just like a
good marriage, with nurture marketing after the sale, your business
relationship will last for a very long time.
.......................................................................................................
Maura Schreier-Fleming works with business and sales professionals
on skills and strategies so they can sell more and be more productive at
work. She is the author of Real-World Selling for
Out-of-this-World Results which is available at
www.BestatSelling.com. She founded her company Best@Selling in
1997. You can reach her at 972.380.0200 or
info@Bestatsellling.com.
(c) Copyright 2004 Maura
Schreier-Fleming. All rights reserved. |
