The Ultimate Sales Machine - Chet Holmes [98]
This is a free [your industry] community ser vice sponsored by our firm as a way to give something back to the market. This executive briefing contains more than $3 million in research; it’s boiled down to a bullet-style, fast-paced outstanding education on how to increase business in this scary period of rising competition and [fill in other pain point here]. Call for your free executive briefing today. The clock is ticking and you’re losing money.
This is a very short letter. It has a clever tie-in to the stopwatch. Since the letter is so brief, it will actually get read. Remember that you are going to launch a campaign, not merely send a single letter. You are committing to breaking through the clutter and gaining brand awareness with this client. Plus, as stated, you’re not going to get what you really want from a letter. Consider the letter to be like long-range bombing: it softens the prospect before you attack directly—before your salesperson calls.
Exercise
Take the list of gifts and write headlines around each gift. Focus the headline on the prospect, not on you. For example:
Tape mea sure: “Make sure you mea sure up.”
Whistle: “Blow the whistle on rising costs in [your industry].”
Calculator: “Calculate how much you’re losing/saving in your battle to dominate.”
Naturally, you have to focus these letters on your offer. If your offer is for a free education, then I have just given you a great foundation for that. However, there may be times when you don’t want to offer an education. You can use this approach in a tactical way to just directly promote your product or ser vice by focusing the letter on the benefits your product or ser vice brings to the prospect.
I have two approaches for using the gifts—before and after the “free education” has been presented. Right now I have a client who has been very successful at getting in front of large buyers and presenting the information. And while the information is excellent and gives my client quite an “in” to get closer to these massive prospects, several of the prospects have seen the information and not yet bought—some just putting off my client, saying, “I would be interested in this in six months,” or a flat-out “Thanks for the info, but I like the providers I have now.” In this case after you present and get turned down, now, the letter can and should be very tactical. Once you have presented, you’ve established a small beachhead in the prospect’s mind. But it is only with constant and intense follow-up that prospects will be won over after they have said no. If you continue to send them the gifts with clever tie-ins to your product, eventually the prospect begins to think: “You know what, let’s give some business to that company that keeps sending us those gifts. Those guys just never give up. Let’s try them out.” Or, it could happen, as I’ve seen 100 times, that you keep following up and one of their preferred providers lets them down in some way and, wham, you are the first company they think of because you never gave up. They turn to you when they need a new provider. So keep sending the mailers. And keep calling behind them.
Business-to-Consumer Strategy
A best-buyer strategy to consumers is more expensive than one that targets businesses because usually you must target a higher number of consumers in order to have an impact. Meaning, if you are going after manufacturers, you can do a major company turnaround by approaching only a few hundred massive companies. But if you are a jewelry store, a car dealership, a dentist, a chiropractor, a boat dealer, or another type of retailer, you have to target a larger number of best buyers to make a difference. Take my example of the real estate salesperson who went after an entire neighborhood of 2,200 upscale homes. She only sent a three-fold flier, but she sent it every month to the same 2,200 homes without fail. If you are a dentist and want your office packed with people who are more concerned with their health than with the money they have to spend