Where to dig for gold....Or that golden new customer
Consider this...For the last year, your friend Mike stopped by your house and buried some gold in your backyard. Sometimes Mike buried little chunks of gold and sometimes he buried large gold bars. The one trick was that Mike didn't tell you where in the backyard the gold was buried.
After some time goes by, one day you decide that it would sure be nice to have some gold for yourself. You suit up with your digging equipment and head out the door. However, instead of heading for your backyard, you jump in your car and drive 100 miles and randomly start looking for gold along the highway.
Do you think that you will find some gold along the highway? Would it be easier to hunt for the gold in your backyard where you know Mike buried some?
This scenario is kind of like looking for new business and new customers. Often times we get caught up looking for new customers in hard places. We randomly make cold calls and send out direct mail pieces. This is like looking for gold along the highway. We forget about our backyard.
As your business continues through the years, you receive calls from people inquiring about your products and services. Many times these calls don't convert into an immediate sale because the product wasn't the right fit or you couldn't deliver according to their time schedule or the company simply changed their mind.
These calls are your little chucks of gold and your big gold bars buried right in your backyard. You don't know which calls could be big opportunities or which ones are small, but you do know that all of the calls had some interest or connection to your business when they initially called.
Do you have a way to keep track of these calls and requests? Is someone keeping a "map" of the inquiries so that you can find them later for follow up, three months, six months down the road?
We recently helped one of our customers begin a new proactive marketing program. We went through the research and discussions regarding the proper source for purchasing a marketing list and how to get started. We reviewed a sample of the data from a list company, but found it wasn't an exact fit for the job titles and people that we sought.
After some discussion, we started to review the various calls and emails which had come inbound over the last few years. We started to build a "map" of contacts of people who knew us. We hoped that in this list we might find a few little chunks of gold and possibly some big gold bars.
While this might seem like an obvious place to look for new contacts and prospects, we often overlook the obvious when deciding where to go with our marketing campaigns. We forget to start by looking at our existing resources and untapped information.
Take some time today to go back in your company data and look for your little chunks of gold. Reach back out to those people and remind them of your business and how you help people solve problems with your products and services. You never know when you might stumble across that gold bar in your backyard.
We went digging in our customer's backyard... We found over 600 names at 250 different companies who know about us. Our next step is to use email marketing to start the communication frequency and education process and hopefully uncover that gold bar.
