First Step Marketing

‘I like life. It’s something to do.’

There is another very important step in this quest for winning new business, that of persistence. Almost anyone can put these steps into place but not many people will keep on for days, weeks, months and years afterwards. Nothing replaces persistence. Persistence is what makes the other steps so powerful.

Perhaps it seems a formidable task to put the new-business system into place and it may be so at the beginning. However, the advantage of persistently pushing those barges down the canal is that you incorporate into your daily operations a system for bringing you continual new-business opportunities.

The expenditures for this process are the costs of your written materials, your telephone and the amount of time your staff spend. The first mailing campaign may cost between R15 and R20 per prospective client, depending on the size and quality of your initial mailing package.

The second and subsequent mailings can cost less or more, depending on your budget and planned scale of inclusions. The commitment time period is a minimum of two years (in three- monthly cycles), which is fairly standard given that the average closing-sale cycle is between 15 and 18 months.

In financial services, for instance, Shearson Lehman, American Express’s bank, confirmed a statistic that I have also noted during my consulting years, which is that it takes around 100 enquiries to convert five pieces of business over a period of about a year.

I found the same statistic true of executive recruiting in London. We had to visit 100 companies before we found five really live possibilities, that is, companies that were unhappy enough with their current supplier to be prepared to move on. Even then, it took a year to 18 months for them to get settled into our organisation and for us to handle them speedily and well. New business takes time.

Hollander Willem Sprokkreeff was with the Hilton Group for many years and earned himself an awesome reputation for almost single-handedly dragging Australia’s hospitality industry into total quality. After 35 years of total commitment to the Hilton Group he retired and began consulting. In a recent meeting he _said that he had found it took $2-million worth of promises to get $200 000 worth of business. It ain’t easy!

‘It is courage the world needs, not infallibility… courage is always the surest wisdom.’

The sad thing is that so many sales people think they are failures because they cannot close a sale instantly. About the only thing you can sell instantly is food and drink to a hungry and thirsty person at the only oasis in the desert! For the rest of us it takes time, especially when the ticket item is high.

I have heard it estimated that replacing sales staff each year is a $6-billion industry. Sales people are hounded by management to close the sale now and, because it does not happen that way, they become discouraged and either resign or are sacked.

Even by offering a reward of $100 000 (as I have done) no one has yet proved that there is any part of the human brain which can be manipulated into buying until such time as that human has established a real need to do so.

The mailing and phoning programme for developing new business is a cost-effective, relationship-building marketing tool that lets you track the expenditures and benefits on a month-by-month basis. It is a technique that can benefit almost any size or type of business or Service Company. You choose the clients you want in your business life and build trusting relationships, which lie at the heart of all business. The sale will follow.

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Persistence pays

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Budgeting, Business Management, Sales, financial. 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.