It is a basic principle of modern marketing that it takes seven “touches” before someone will recognize and act upon your call to action. These touches of targets can take many forms including:
So touches can be expensive (workshop) or inexpensive (cold call, blog, email) and everything in between. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could determine early on in your marketing efforts if a target is worthy of your time, effort, and future marketing dollars? Actually you can. It’s called qualifying and all good marketing campaigns will include a planned method of qualifying targets as quickly as possible. Qualifying almost always involves personal contact, either face-to-face, through the telephone, or through email. In virtually all cases, however, you should qualify a prospect as quickly as possible in any campaign you create.
An example of a Qualifying Step in your marketing campaign would be a follow up call after one or two direct mail postcards or an invitation card has been sent. Campaigns involving live workshops or seminars have a qualifying step by default, when you place the call to see if the target can attend.
On the Qualifying Step, you really have THREE options in mind:
While it may sound counter-productive to delete the names of business owners you worked so hard to obtain, it is anything but. Consider this, however. You only have so much time for active prospecting. Shrinking your list by deleting the “pits” from your CRM’s active lead list or drip list will ultimately leave you with nothing but “cherries” or prospective “cherries”. Some cherries may be “green cherries” that may still need some dripping to ripen over time and others “ripe cherries” ready for picking. Demote the pits on your CRM and Email Program. They will opt out anyway.
Qualifying and re-qualifying is always done on the phone or in rare cases, in person. Your compiled and email (drip) lists will need constant weeding out and upgrading. And this means using the phone.
You should make an effort to call members of your drip list at least once every six months. Quarterly is better. Find some “ammunition” that gives you and excuse to call. Email or mail the ammunition and then follow up within 48 hours using the phone. By periodically re-qualifying, you will have built lists of highly qualified targets and you will know that every marketing dollar you spend is not wasted.
Ammunition can be almost anything that paves the way for a qualifying or re-qualifying call where you can nurture a relationship. It can be a case study you create or a recent article you come across on the web that references a prospect’s business type or industry. It can also be an article or informative piece regarding a prospect’s interests in sports or hobbies. For example, if you noted a prospect had an interest in scuba diving on a previous call and stumble across a great article about diving off some exotic island, send the article to him/her and follow up with a call in a few days. Relationship building pays huge dividends over time and makes business development much, much easier.