How Silence Can help You Close More SalesWritten by Ken Levine
Silence is GoldenWant to close more sales? STOP TALKING!!!!! Think back to your high school and college days. When your teacher or professor told you that whatever he/she was talking about was going to be on a test or quiz, did you listen more intently? Did you wakeup and start taking notes? Were you suddenly trying to capture as much information as possible? When you are on a sales call, it's not too much different than what was supposed to happen when you were in a classroom environment. You were there to learn. You were there to obtain information. Your client is meeting with you presumably because they need help. Are you giving your clients solution before you really understand problem? Do you have a tendency to interrupt people and give them your ideas before they can complete a sentence? When you do talking, you are inhibiting your prospects and clients from wanting to talk. Your job is not to dominate conversation and give a lot of advice. Your job is to listen, and encourage your prospects to keep on talking. Your job is to help your customer solve a problem. Your job is to find root of problem and determine if your customer wants to fix it. You can't do that if you are dominating a conversation.
| | It's In The Mail - Direct Mail is Alive and Kicking!Written by Jim Logan
Compared to a lot of companies in our field we do a lot of direct mail – postcards, sales letters, promotions, announcements, lead generation. Between client business and ours, we’re averaging one campaign every two weeks; about 1500 pieces per mailing. We’re planning expansion to over 2000 pieces per campaign and will increase mailings to once per week. One particular business interest will grow to 10,000 pieces a month. We’re constantly building and adding to our mailing lists.We’ve learned a lot along way. We develop entire piece in-house and use printing services such as 48hourprint.com for production. We discovered bulk and presorted mail a while back and our costs dropped. We developed a couple in-house processes with staff to form a production-line approach to stuffing, sorting, and stamping pieces for delivery to local USPS office. By producing piece and mailing this way, our costs are low enough to make it affordable – we can recover costs with first client project. We don’t currently use email marketing, ezine or newsletter stuff in our business. We have an auto-responder solution that’s never been used. I’ll probably begin a newsletter of sorts and use auto-responder in not too distant future. But until then, we haven’t used those solutions in our own business. Direct mail is effective enough that we haven’t felt need to do otherwise. But that will change with plans to expand our business. Our direct mail campaigns are targeted to business leaders of all sizes, from venture backed companies to local small businesses and F500 executives. We’ve found results to be about same for all targets. Also, we’ve used direct mail in public sector and have had great success in lead generation efforts to meet with elected and senior non-elected officials. We use Michael Bolyan’s Circle of Leverage technique and write copy using Doug Hall’s three pillar approach to customer communications. We shy from popular direct mail copy writing techniques that to me read like infomercials. Simple, to point, and actionable – that’s about all we do.
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