Following up with customers and interested prospects is an area that probably most marketers are actually poor at, as everybody is trying to avoid annoying people on their database.
What I think it really comes down to though is not having enough value to offer your customers or prospects in exchange for making contact other than just trying to push them along towards a sale.
I am amazed by just how many people and companies are running away from “selling” or “marketing” because they think its dirty and unnecessary. In fact I spoke about this in a similar article on the love and hate in sales and marketing. It’s not selling and marketing that is the problem, its how people use it in ways that are not mutually beneficial to supplier, customer or partner.
One of the companies I’ve been working with recently landed a £70K+ contract to design and build a customised piece of advanced manufacturing technology, after they were told that the buyer was going to place an order with another supplier just before Christmas last year because they were too expensive.
Now, most companies at this point would have given up, or started to panic, but I knew their was a deal waiting to happen and it just need the right moves.
I don’t know about you but I’ve noticed that whenever the subjects of Marketing and Sales come up it’s like watching the front row of a horror film at it’s most gruesome part of the show. Just the words on their own are enough to spin people into a frenzy of anger, even when the topic is essential to not just every businesses or organisation but to each and everyone one of us in our daily lives. Connecting and creating friendships, relationships and valuable partnerships is what makes the world go around and we all sell and market in some shape or form, whether we know it or not.
Referrals are an awesome tool for growing your business if you already have a few happy customers.
Recently I had a climeeting with Miles a local builder at a Pub in Belbroughton called the Talbot.
Miles was struggling, and needed some more business quickly and needed it fast. He was thinking about having a new website built but I was unsure that this was the best thing to do as he needed some quick wins and a website takes a bit of time to generate results.
This is an email I received from Mike Southon who’s column you can read at the FT. I really liked it so decided to copy the entire email as Mike wrote it and added a few additions below. You can also see his blog here.
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Most entrepreneurs are very comfortable when offering products and services to friends and close associates. It becomes much more difficult when they find themselves in front of a seasoned professional: the purchasing director.
Finding a customer (trail blaze) or having a customer find you (bread trail) has a dramatic impact on how a commercial relationship develops.
Trail blazing beats a path to the front door of your customers and prospects whether its over the phone, in the mail, TV or radio it basically interrupts somebody’s routine to engage in a potentially mutual outcome. However, the problem with this method is that its been abused so much over time by scam artists and low to no service orientated businesses that people are sceptical and uneasy about such methods and most of the time you are “interrupting” and the people being contacted have no immediate need or desire for what you are offering. You end up becoming the unwelcome pest if not done correctly and without quickly evaluating your prospects position or their timing you may end up with the door slammed in your face.
I don’t know about you, but for a while now I’ve been receiving a lot of communications from people running around saying that search is dead and social is going to take over (read scare munge-ring). Why ? Because they say you will get a better response from friends and colleagues on social media sites….
Hmm… didn’t we all have “real” friends and colleagues before social media came along….and did you make all your decisions based on what your friends and colleagues said then….nope…neither did I.
I just came back from a commercial strategy meeting with a customer and one of the areas they had been struggling with is poor sales conversion ratios. It turns out that the company is putting in a lot of upfront design work in order to be able to provide a price and proposal only to find out that its “too expensive”.
There had been discussions about price being the main reason that sales were being lost but I had a feeling that it was down to a lack of qualification as their service was high quality and solved a problem that other suppliers in the market could not do as well (value driven, not a commodity).
Aardvark Engineering is one of only two companies shortlisted in two categories for the British Engineering Excellence Awards (BEEA) after successfully demonstrating the companies engineering and business skills.
The Awards aim to demonstrate and promote the quality of engineering design within the UK; to emphasise innovation and effectiveness in order to allow smaller companies to compete on an equal footing with larger ones; to act as an incentive to the design engineering industry to create world-class businesses; to provide a benchmark of excellence from which the industry can learn and from which it can build; and to demonstrate the power of engineering design innovation within the UK to the world.
Okay, so you got some marketing material from a company which interests you and give them a call to further proceedings. The conversation goes well but there are still a few things you need to iron out face to face, so you book a meeting.
Meeting day comes and you have armed yourself with insightful questions and background research ready to further your already strengthening commitment to this project. The call comes in to the office that your 10 o’clock has just arrived and you make your way down stairs to the reception area.
Mention the words cold and call to business people and the majority cringe at the thought because we’ve all experienced those boiler room phone calls where your gabled at and coaxed at a hundred miles an hour while they try and close a deal over the phone for some product you just don’t need, but somehow feel obliged to purchase.
But cold calling doesn’t have to be like that. I prefer to use the term prospecting which is more about using the phone as a way of researching and learning about the people in your market, both prospects and customers.
Before I continue I would like to point out that networking does work. From experiece though it’s the kind of networks you build that are there no matter what happens, that believe in you, as much as you in them, like true friends and family members who make a difference.
These are networks you build over time and it’s because of what you do, not what club you are in or how expensive your membership is that counts. I have been a member of many networking clubs and organisations and have found myself in a position of contributing heavily, while listening to others complain about what’s wrong with this and why that would be better like that, but do little to change it.
Business XL published an article on the way recruitment companies do business and the fact that their attitude towards growth was just a numbers games with little creativity or consideration going into the real service they provide their customers. It boiled down to targets for CV’s sent to clients being prioritised over offering a quality service.
I happen to agree. The key to “getting on” as an individual or business is being able to stand out from the crowd and to be recognised (for something constructive). Instead though what must of these agencies end up doing is taking a CV and extracting the information from it to fill in the fields in the boxes on their forms and in their own interpretation.
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