Remember making an appointment to visit a prospect?
Ah, belly to belly. Those were the days.
But what other novel approaches to connecting with clients and leads are there besides Zoom? And how to use video calls to bump up ROI?
And how can you use a mix of channels to warm up and close your prospects instead of JUST in-person calls or JUST telemarketing?
Its time for you to get your competition on their toes: cue the next industrial revolution!
The reason belly to belly is a tried and tested fave is because it does a lot of things at once:
builds rapport and trust (they can see you exist, get a vibe of you, build a reciprocal relationship)
it’s a 2-way conversation in their territory (helping them feel in control)
it forces both parties to focus on the conversation at hand as it was a pre-decided appointment
shows effort on your part (your company has gone out of its way to visit, which costs time and money)
And that is why it is especially useful in B2B industries; for example wholesalers, manufacturers, suppliers.
It is also used a lot in the early days – especially in networking settings – by start-ups and non-B2B businesses.
However, there are some downsides:
Harder to scale – your sales reps can only be physically in one place at a given time, not a hundred. Which means to scale you need more sales reps, which comes with high overheads
Relies on human energy and enthusiasm – after x amount of visits in x amount of days, it takes a toll on the energy of a rep which impacts the quality of the call.
Generally forces the prospect to find a time during prime working hours to accommodate the visit, instead of whenever suits them
Traditionally, a lot of companies use visits throughout the sales process: to introduce themselves to a prospect, then to warm the client up, then to close the client, then to nurture the relationship to keep them coming back and cross-sell. If you can afford that great – or not… because you could potentially be getting better ROI from training them to close the sale in the first visit, or from using other methods as well or instead of just visits.
It doesn’t work if your country has travel or work restrictions during a viral pandemic, whoops!
So whether you are a self-employed party of one or a long-time mega monopoly in your industry, it’s the perfect time to implement a diverse plan of methods you use in your sales and marketing process.
A note on that – too many of us are taught to see sales and marketing departments as different and sometimes even opposing things, when in fact they are part of the same coin.
Perhaps a clearer way to see things is as inbound/passive marketing activities or outbound/prospecting activities:
Inbound/attractive/passive marketing (Prospect qualifies or disqualifies themselves)
Website contact-us page
Experiential marketing/expo’s
Social media posts
Email newsletters
SEO, Original blogs
Free downloads in exchange for their contact details
Online presentations, demos, webinars
Online quiz or questionnaire
Outbound/outreach marketing/prospecting (Company qualifies the prospect)
Direct mail, unsolicited hardcopy marketing
Visiting prospects/clients, in-person presentations
Direct messaging on social media
Cold emails or phonecalls
Mass emailing a list you exported off social media or purchase (illegal in many places and a sure-fire way to repel business)
Contacting referrals
Approaching people at a tradeshow or networking event
Door knocking
The sweet spot, the place where money is left on the table, is in the middle.
Too many businesses and industries stick to too few methods and don’t use data from one method to guide how they approach another method.
The treasure is when you can combine things from both lists.
For example, if you can set up your SEO to lead someone to an online demo where they have to give you their email address and name to register, now you have a warm lead to “cold call”.
Suddenly the call is not so cold, because they already know who you are!
Even if they register and never got around to watching your demo, you now have them in your database and can contact them with a phone call, to build rapport and trigger them into going back to watch the demo — or short-cutting them to the next step toward a transaction.
You can flip this idea a few other ways… for example yes, you could cold-call a purchased list of potential buyers OR you could go look at who subscribes to your email newsletters and first contact those that are already clients via phone or email with a wonderful, personalised script to ask for a specific kind of referral; then contact those that are subscribed but not yet clients to find out more about their business problems and ask if you can get in touch further – be it a face to face call (in non-pandemic times, of course), zoom chat, or sending them an online presentation.
Or! You could post generic value-added content on social media, then direct-message the people who engage with your stuff the most to see if you can do a zoom call and learn more about their business.
Not enough businesses realize the gold is in blending both sides of the columns. For example, they assume their methods should be all digital or all offline. Or they conclude telemarketing is a waste of time because they have only tried cold leads and not calling referrals.
Make your goal to find warm leads that are going unnoticed, rather than finding cold leads that have never heard of you! Make your goal to warm people up and find out their problems before asking them to listen to your pitch.
You may be surprised at how many end up requesting you for a pitch.
OK so let’s look at how you can future-proof your process for finding and converting leads, without depending on just one method, or improving your ROI and filling in the gaps.
First:
List the top methods you already use and brainstorm the leads from those you are leaving off the table at the moment
Explore and list different tools that would boost these top methods, and research the marketing and selling methods other industries use. (Some of our suggestions below)
List 3 things outside of your industry you found and up to 20 ways each idea could be adapted to your industry/company. Try not to knock these adaptations during the brainstorming process, just get the ideas out for now. If you are struggling, envision how your competition would use the idea, feel the jealousy arise, and write it down!
Choose the one that would be easiest to implement right now. Then prioritise the rest of the ideas and implement them one after the other as needed, rather than all at the same time and spreading yourself painfully thin.
Send us your new plan, and we will choose a reader to receive customised help from our team!
We’ve started a list of tools to explore as part of question 2:
Personalized video in your cold or follow-up emails, like what https://bombbomb.com offers (certain industries or start-ups not yet aiming for scale could get away with using Loom or attaching a file, though)
Replying to social media comments or direct messages with video using a personalized https://www.loom.com/ recording
Conditional Logic Quizzes (from the likes of https://bucket.io/2/) for research, leads, or research that leads to leads - that helps you segment your lead before contacting them with the offer that best suits their results
Click funnel pages to lead prospects through a “presentation”/sales pages online, leading to a sale and cross/up-sells, free downloads in exchange for contact details, or booking a call-back time - you could check out www.ClickFunnels.com
Next-level-expos like the Experiential Marketing ideas in https://www.bizbash.com/
[insert your ideas….]
