I’ve spent most of my life in marketing and sales in one form or another.
Straight out of high school I went to work as a receptionist for one of the most prestigious divorce litigation and business valuation CPA firms in Northern California. Sales, you say? Absolutely! I was the first point of contact anyone had with our firm. We were a boutique firm as well, so there wasn’t marketing or sales staff. Part of my job was answering potential clients customers about our firm and closing the sale – that is, setting up an initial appointment with them. I produced marketing materials for them as well, and was responsible for most of the written communication that went out the door.After that I worked at a financial firm, doing admin for the marketing department. One of my responsibilites there was to call brokers and get them to agree to meet with out regional marketing directors as they made their way through the area. It was cold calling, to a usually uninterested audience.
Thereafter I worked with two companies that sold leads of people who wanted to buy cars to local dealerships. In one of these jobs, I dealt with both the customer and the dealership, in the other I dealt only with the dealership convincing them to buy our leads.
And I was successful – usually at the top of or within spitting distance of the top of the sales board.
I don’t have game, I don’t have lines. I worked with people who were much better at being smooth and saying all the right things that I was. So how’d I do it? Follow up and persistence. Didn’t buy the first call? They’d get a call until they bought or until they told me not to ever call again (sometimes even then I’d just call back and ask for a different person). I took meticulous notes of every communication I had with each prospect, so when I did follow up I knew about them, their business, their needs and how my company could fill them.
Same thing with internet marketing. I was the first person to bring direct sales tactics to the whole MySpace bot crowd by using a direct response salesletter and requiring email signups to download the demo. As a result, I was able to follow up with people over and over again after their initial download and remind them of my product and why they should buy it. It’s simple, but no one else in the marketplace was doing it at the time, and as a result I held the lion’s share of the market for the year my product was available.
It’s important to capture email addresses so you can follow up with your prospects! Most people do not buy upon their first visit to your site. So you have to help them come back to your site!
Capture the email addresses and load an autoresponder with followups for them.
It’s the simplest way to make more sales, and it’s how I’ve succeeded not just here in internet marketing, but prior offline jobs as well.
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