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Part 2 of a four part series By Michael Hepworth, from choice Magazine
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NEVER COLD CALL AGAIN - GETTING QUALIFIED PROSPECTS TO CALL YOU
Michael Hepworth is the StreetSmart Marketer; coach, mentor and author. The StreetSmart Marketer guides business owners to out-perform; their history, their competition and their expectations. More free practical marketing tips can be found at www.streetsmartmarketer.com PART TWO: CREATING YOUR CUSTOMER MAGNET! In part 1 of this series we focused on why cold calling doesn't work for coaches and other professionals. Part 2 continues with tips of how to build your "customer magnet" so that clients will beat a path to your door. Developing Your Customer Magnet The first step in the process is to develop a bait piece or customer magnet that you give away without any obligation to interested prospects. The bottom line is that it's far easier to give away an educational piece that teaches your prospect how to buy, than it is to pitch people on something you are trying to sell them. If this is well done it positions you as an expert that prospects are more interested in talking to. Instead of, "some poor schmuck trying to sell something". If people find it convincing, they'll call you. Being positioned in this way is far more powerful than any prospecting you could do. So What's a Bait Piece? It can be a report, a white paper, a guide and executive briefing, a CD, a DVD that documents the problem your prospects are dealing with and explores solutions. It draws prospects to you hungry for solutions to their problems. Just like fishing, you need the right bait to attract the right kind of prospects, so you must be clear about who you want to attract and what their needs are.
One of my clients manufactures back supports and pillows which are sold through chiropractors and physiotherapists to people with back and neck pain. He decided he wanted to start selling direct to consumers. He tried advertising his products but had little success. He considered direct mail, but didn't know how to identify back pain sufferers, so he could mail them information. Unfortunately doctors and chiropractors won't sell you their list of patients with back pain. So we developed a report; "How to Avoid, Control or Eliminate Back Pain Forever." The report was very objective and explained why we get back pain and what the solutions were to treating it without drugs or surgery. The only people who would be interested in this, would be back pain sufferers, or people who knew someone with back pain, so it was well targeted. My client had been running advertisements for his products in consumer oriented publications with minimal success. Most of his home grown ads produced no more than 5 or 6 inquiries and no sales. The first time we ran the new ad for the report, we received 325 responses, most of whom were qualified. The ad was exactly the same size in the same journals, so there was no difference in cost. Our objective was to identify back pain sufferers who could then be marketed to as we now had permission to communicate with them and they had given us their contact info to enable us to deliver the report to them. How many of those people would have responded positively to a sales pitch on the phone? Yet most were receptive to receiving direct mail covering products to help them alleviate their pain. Depending on what your business is and who your clients are, you can offer items with enticing headlines like:
Michael Hepworth is the StreetSmart Marketer; coach, mentor and author. The StreetSmart Marketer guides business owners to out-perform; their history, their competition and their expectations. More free practical marketing tips can be found at www.streetsmartmarketer.com Feedback
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