Are you missing out on 50% of your potential sales without even realising it?
I'm willing to bet you are...
Why? Because you don't have an effective follow up system.
Let me explain...
You create some form of lead generation mechanism - be it an advertisement, telemarketing or direct mail.
Prospects call and some buy whatever you're selling. But what about the people who don't buy first off? They may be interested, but not ready to buy for a plethora of reasons.
In most organisations they go into a big black hole - never to be contacted again.
As a result you keep running the lead generation activities, bringing in new prospects, but never recontact the ones who initially didn't buy. Just because they weren't ready then, doesn't mean they'll never be ready.
I'm going to give you a couple of real world examples.
My friend Alan Hewitt of Earthstar Publishing markets Meditation CD's.
He runs lead generation advertisements offering a Free Mediation Report and CD, both on-line and in various magazines.
The advertisements direct you to a web page where you can request the Report and CD.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
Alan tells me about 50% of his sales are made within the first 30 days of someone requesting information.
And the other 50% come from the consistent follow up over the next few months.
As it happens I met someone last weekend who'd actually bought Alan's product directly as a result of this follow up.
We were talking about meditation and he told me he'd bought these meditation CD's and they were fantastic. Naturally, I asked which ones and they turned out to be Alan's.
Now being a good student of marketing, I obviously asked him what he thought of Alan's process.
What came out absolutely confirmed the power of follow up in building familiarity and trust.
Daniel said he's not a trusting type. He didn't know if the product would work and certainly didn't have money to throw around.
But it was Alan's follow up system of sending out the free report and demo CD which got him to first base. Then it was the additional and consistent follow up over a number of weeks that convinced him to give it a go.
And now he's a convert!
But it could have been so different.
Alan could have stopped at just one step and Daniel would never have bought. And the tragedy here is both parties miss out. Daniel misses out on a wonderful experience and Alan loses a sale.
And the second example is us.
We've been writing this newsletter for about 9 years. Yes, sometimes it's hard work and I often feel coming up with topics is like pulling teeth.
But the financial rewards have been significant. This newsletter has brought in a great many clients over the years - either directly (someone on our list puts up their hand and becomes a client), or as a supporting mechanism where people get to know, like and trust us.
I've often been at networking functions where people tell me they know me from our newsletters and admire our consistency.
It's all about building a community.
What are you doing to build your community?
Rashid.
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