First Step Marketing

Mailing and phoning around 200 people over a three-month period (60 working days) means you only have to make a few mailings and follow-up phone calls per day.

Never mail a huge amount all at once as you will get so far behind in trying to contact people for an appointment that you will be overwhelmed and stop trying. Instead, mail three or four each night and, after an interval of about a week, phone those three or four people. If you don’t reach them on the first try, try once more that day.

If you reach them, terrific! If you don’t, send a note-card saying, ‘Sorry I missed you.’ Just keep moving. Do not get bogged down by worrying about the 200 people as a whole. Simply see them as small lots of three or four mailings and a few phone calls per day.

Whether used together with other marketing strategies or on its own, this programme can be managed by an individual entrepreneur or by the secretary or assistant to the chief executive officer of a large company.

By making relationship-building with prospects a regular part of your business activities, and not a once-a-year sales effort, you will always be in the middle of new-business building, whether times are good or bad. It is my belief that this is just the right solution for the present, unpredictable climate.

‘I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.’

As I said earlier, when I contact my clients around the world and ask them, ‘Of all the things we said and did together, what made the difference?’ without exception I get the reply, ‘Not feeling guilty for 91 days!’

Some days will be magic; everything will flow, everything you touch will go well and life will be worth living after all. Then bang! — clients and customers complain, you have a fight with someone you love, your boss refuses to give you a raise and your holiday leave. What happened? And what will you do? One of two things. You can either react/resign/ storm out and take it all personally or you can stand back and analyse, understand, shrug and move on. These people with whom you had trouble were probably under pressure.

When you know how they, and you, behave under pressure, you can understand the situation, handle it well and move to other things. After all, it won’t matter in a hundred years, you may murmur to yourself.

For an easier life all round, read the next step to understand how you can keep clients and prospects (and personal relationships) on a more even keel.

Key point to remember

Be persistent. Most people do not make even one business- development phone call a day, regularly and relentlessly. They don’t even work through 60 likely prospects over a three-month period.

It can be that easy: as few as one prospect a day will generate rewards. Three a day is fine and five a day is excellent because, multiplied by 60 working days in three months, you will have 300 people you are phoning, sending cards to, faxing, following up on and sending articles to over a three- month period.

When the numbers get too high, use computers. In Hong Kong we had to advise 100 000 mothers of the changing needs of their babies and the new size of Pampers they should be using. We certainly needed computers for that quarterly contact. In America we had 8 000 prospects country-wide — computers again came to our aid. In England I had 400 prospects — computers were a great help.

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Persistence pays continue…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Business Plans, Home Based Business, Marketing, Sales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.