The only thing contingent upon charging Premium Prices and Doing Business on our terms is having enough volume to sustain our desired growth and profitability. To do this, we must understand the concept of marketing to generate qualified prospects, which we discussed in detail in the previous section. From here, we will now look at the three most effective, reliable and profitable relationships in our business and how to maximize them. By nurturing an ongoing relationship with our target market by means of the three methods, you will see that they will become key assets to your business and stakeholders in your success.
One of the most important concepts to becoming the “premium provider” and “expert” in what you do is building a relationship with key groups of people so that they become assets to your business. We find these groups in your prospect list, referral base, and business alliances. All of these groups have the good fortune to routinely come in contact with you and your marketing efforts – these efforts will serve to continually and repetitively encourage, persuade, and qualify those people to be interested whenever it is right for them to do business with us. The power of these methods is in having sources of ongoing future clients, month in and month out, which can be systematically leveraged so that you can almost rely on these relationships in building volume for your business.
Prospect List – Keep and Build an ongoing list.
This list is your money in the bank for future sales. This entire section will be summed up with one concept: Just because someone does not buy NOW, doesn’t mean that they won’t buy LATER. The various philosophies of becoming the Premium Provider, Target Marketing, and Qualifying Prospects are designed to put you in a position to garner sales automatically from your Target Market because you are known by them and have steadily maintained your “expert status.”
Life changes all the time – doesn’t it! Yours does and the lives of your prospects are no different. As our life changes over time, we may begin to think about buying a car or new house or any other type of service or product. We typically go through stages of “thinking about it” “researching it” “really thinking about it” “looking around at it” even “going through the process” “making it work into the budget” etc. There are numerous “stages” that have every-thing to do with buying except buying. Our objective is to stay in front of our target market of future clients on an ongoing basis so that when the time is right for them, we will be there and have the answer.
The Method
Our method is to build a list of all prospective clients, especially those that we market to and who will at some point “raise their hand.” Then we will continuously correspond with them in some form, phone, fax, email, mail, etc. at routine intervals. In future projects, we refer to these as “campaigns” designed for specific reasons for specific people to create buying traffic.
The intervals will be determined by;
buying season
buying temperature of prospect
holiday or promotions
other occasions to spark interest or re-ignite their interest
otherwise regular monthly mailings are recommended
The importance behind this concept relies on the idea that at some point everyone (at least in your target market) will need your product or service. It’s up to you to inform, persuade, and educate them about you and how you can/will fulfill their need/want. The next step is to continually REMIND them so that they never forget that YOU’RE the one they should visit when their need arises or desire culminates.
Valuable $$$ Resource
This list can be, if utilized effectively, be one of the most valuable, money making, and consistent resources of your company. This list is compiled of anyone who expresses an interest in your product or service. In many cases, this list is a collaboration of our Target Market – for example:
- Marketing = get responses, that’s interest
- Walk-ins to your store = inquiry, that’s interest
- Website visitors = opt-in information, that’s interest
- Promotional Activities = gather leads, etc., those people are interested
There are a vast number of ways to build this list. Basically it is a list of anyone who inquires (express an interest or raises their hand) about your product or service and does not on or during the initial process, purchase something. These are the hottest prospects because for some reason, they have taken the initiative to at least inquire – meaning they had an inclination to buy.
A very basic but overlooked truth to sales in my opinion is that anyone who inquires, with few exceptions, intends to at some point buy or is at least interested in buying. You must build your marketing and sales process to almost take for granted that the people WILL do business with you – do this in a good way – do not overlook details or hesitate to go out of your way to get them to buy – DO JUST THE OPPOSITE – have the basic assumption that THEY WANT YOU – THEY MAY NOT KNOW IT YET – BUT THEY DO.
Sales advice to live by – “if someone says no, they’re not saying NO because they don’t want what you are offering, they just have not received enough REASONS to say YES”
Scott Manning, President - Manning Methods, LLC. Contact by phone 317 407-3382 or email sj@manningmethods.com