Using The Industry Articles You Read To Stay In Touch With Prospects

You’ve called and emailed a prospect as often as reasonable and you’ve done everything to show them the value of the product or service you’re selling. We’ve all been there – we know exactly when it is time to let the prospect go and move on to the next one.

But, what if instead of completely letting go, you kept that prospect on a drip campaign that did nothing but provide them with some bellwether industry information and the latest industry news from time to time? Or, better yet, sent them a personalized email at some seemingly random times that provided them with this content.

This is the age of content marketing. And while not a new concept, today’s sales and marketing professionals need to keep in mind that simply providing a prospect with information about your product and all of its bells and whistles simply does not cut it anymore. Prospects want to buy from people they know are thought leaders and who have a close eye on the market’s pulse, not just someone who scanned their badge or bought their name on a list.

It is going to take multiple touches to make a sale these days, and if you simply continue to prod people with nothing but facts about your company and its products or services, you are going to lose their interest pretty quickly.

Chances are, you spend at least a small part of your day reading up on the latest trends and news about the industry in which you work. If not, and you’re in sales and marketing, trust me when I tell you that you should be.

When you come across a particularly interesting article, spend a few moments thinking about whom on your prospect list might also be interested in that article. Shoot them a hand-typed, text only email with a link to the article. Don’t explain how the article relates to your product or service or tell them about a discount promotion you’re running, simply, send them a quick message briefly explaining how you just finished reading an article you feel they might find interesting.

I’ve seen this relatively easy method for creating a touch point bring a cold prospect back to the table and even into the win column. You will find that over time, your prospects are not only going to see you as an industry thought leader, but also come to feel that you genuinely care about the well being of their business.

When you are out making sales and someone tells you that they actually feel you care more about their business than they do, you know you’re doing some good out there. If you’ve never heard that before, then it sounds like it’s time for you to build and strengthen some relationships. One of the best ways to do that, especially when a prospect has given you every indication they are simply not interested in your product, is to start reaching out to them about their industry and showing them that you care about their business. A simple and easy way to do that is to start sending them links in a personal message to some of the articles that you have recently read.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Screen capture by William L. Savastano

It's Time To Win The War Against Your Inbox!

I’m sure there are more than a few resources out there designed to help all of us manage one of the most daunting things in our modern lives – our email inboxes – but since I’ve never actually used any of those resources, I figured I’d throw my hat in the ring as well and share my management tactics.

Over the years I have amassed a number of different email addresses, both personal and professional, and in the interest of making sure I don’t miss out on a single contact, I still maintain nearly all of them. From the AOL email addresses I used in college to the ones I manage on a shared server today, each one reminds me of a different time in my life, serves a different purpose and delivers content that I am still interested in reading.

Whether you have one email address, or way too many like I do, here are some simple steps you can take to make sure your inbox and its content are manageable:

First and foremost, if you are lucky enough to have just one email address, please feel free to skip down to the next paragraph, but if you are like most of us, you have more than one email address. You may have so many email addresses that you don’t know what to do with them. I want you to pick one of them – maybe it is the most professional, or maybe it is the easiest to check because it’s the one on your phone – but either way, choose one email address and then set up a forward to it from all of your other email addresses. Ideally, do this in a manner that allows you to reply back to each email from any of your email addresses, but if not, the process is still manageable.

Once you have everything coming in to just one email address, it is time to get ready for battle. It is not going to be easy – it is going to get frustrating and feel really repetitive at times, but there are all sorts of scammers and spammers, phishers and peddlers and they want nothing more than to see you drowning in unwanted emails. The only way you are going to get your inbox to a manageable level is going to be for you to go to war against all those unwanted emails.

The first thing you can do to fight back is to make sure you continue to protect yourself. You are going to be opening a lot of emails as part of this process, but you need to remember, above all else, that every time you see an email you think is a security threat, delete it immediately. Don’t even try to open it on any device. There is no way to manage or stop these emails, but give yourself peace of mind by deleting them right out the gate.

Unfortunately, even after doing that, you are still going to have a lot of unwanted email left in your inbox. Great deals on cars, great deals on loans, great deals on all sorts of pharmaceuticals and great deals on just about anything else you can think of - all of them cluttering your inbox. If you use your email addresses for business at all, it can be even worse - you get a ton of email trying to sell you products and services as well as a ton of emails about conferences, seminars, webcasts and all sorts of white papers. It may seem the best thing to do is to simply delete all of these emails, too, but sadly, if you just delete all of these unwanted emails, you are going to keep getting more and more of them. It’s almost like the more you delete, the more they send!

But, if you fight back by taking the time to open each of these emails, scroll down to the bottom and unsubscribe, over time, you will start to witness a miracle! Your inbox will actually start receiving less and less of these unwanted and unsolicited emails. You are always going to see new ones and they may come in waves, but overall, if you keep up the good fight and continue to unsubscribe, you will definitely see a positive difference.

I’ll say it again, just to drive the point home. If you think it’s a security threat, don’t open the email. All other emails, open them, no matter how uninterested you are in what they are selling. Scroll down to the bottom until you see a link to unsubscribe. It might be a little hidden or be a linked image, but it should be there. It won’t be there EVERY time, but when you see it, click on it. You should sometimes get a message that you have been automatically unsubscribed simply by clicking on the link, and other times, you’ll be asked to provide your email address. Make sure you know which address the email was sent to (this is for those of you with multiple email addresses) and be sure you enter that email address into the field correctly. Make sure you click unsubscribe and stick around long enough to make sure you see a confirmation that you have been subscribed in some way before backing out of the browser window. Keep in mind that these spammers are hoping that you’ll miss a step or get so frustrated with their unsubscribe process that you’ll simply quit trying.

After you feel you’ve successfully unsubscribed, go back to the original email and scroll down further than that first unsubscribe link you clicked. Chances are, you are going to find a second or maybe even third unsubscribe link down there. This is because there may be an unsubscribe link for the campaign, then one for the spammer, and one for the company that is actually selling the product. If you don’t subscribe from each and every unsubscribe link on each of these unwanted emails, you’ll probably still keep getting email from them. Be sure to go back to each email and ensure you’ve unsubscribed from each link.

And, lastly, while you’ve deleted the obvious security threat emails and unsubscribed from all the unwanted emails, there is still one more step – taking a good hard look at the remaining emails – the ones you supposedly do want to receive. As you read each one of these emails, give a little thought to whether you really do read it or if you really want to keep receiving it. If you do, by all means, just let it keep coming, but if you don’t really read it – if you tend to just skim it or delete it pretty quickly - you may as well just unsubscribe from that email as well.

If you do just these few things – delete the scary stuff immediately, unsubscribe from EVERY unsubscribe link in an unwanted email, and unsubscribe from the stuff you don’t really read, you will soon find that your inbox is actually not only manageable, but you might actually enjoy checking your email again!

ASP vs. SaaS vs. Cloud

We’ve all heard the cliché about how the only constant in technology is change, but during a recent product launch planning session, a small group of us who, if for no other reason than the years under out belts, consider ourselves to have been around the block a few times, were laughing a little bit about the semantics of “The Cloud” and how it resembles two other big buzzwords we’d marketed in the past, ASP and SaaS.

This got me thinking about the similarities and differences between these technologies and while I have, in fact, marketed all three over the years, I had never really taken the time to compare and contrast them. So, just for fun – if you can consider researching software platforms fun – I decided to take a closer look and then put together a little write up on what I discovered.

Click here to read ASP vs. SaaS vs. Cloud.

Your Marketing Mystery Box Didn't Work!

I just watched your ridiculously expensive direct mail marketing piece get opened in the elevator and I hate to tell you - it completely bombed. I didn’t get a chance to see your company name because it happened so fast, but I can tell you this – it was a complete and total waste of your money.

I was coming back from a walk and noticed a gentleman walking into my building with what I thought was a white cake box. After my mind cycled through all of the desserts I was craving at the time, I realized he and I were most likely going to end up in the same elevator. I smiled as I thought of how great it was going to smell in that elevator on the way up, especially if there was something good like donuts or fresh croissants in that cake box!

The gentleman and I made our way into the building through separate doors and he reached the elevator first. As he adjusted his grip on the box to free a hand to push the elevator button, I realized the white box was actually shaped like home plate. For you non-baseball-fans, home plate is the five-sided, square with a triangle on the bottom home base from baseball that you stand over when batting.

Just as the elevator door opened, two other gentlemen reached the elevator from the other side of the building and all four of us got inside. One of the newly arrived guys asked the guy with the home plate-shaped box, “Got something good in there?” As the door closed, the guy who asked the question pushed the “2” button and I pushed “7”. Seemed like they were all getting off at “2” so I made the assumption at that point, it wasn’t the random curiosity of a stranger wondering what was in the box, but that these three fellow elevator riders knew each other.

The guy holding the box said, “I don’t know, let’s take a look.” He flipped open the top flap of the box to reveal a home plate-shaped foam pad, obviously there to protect the contents inside, and a nicely printed letter sitting on top. Just as frivolously as he’d flipped open the box, the guy flipped up the letter as he said, “Obligatory letter,” and then reached for the padding.

I chuckled to myself a little here because as many of you know, I earn my living by writing the words that would go on that letter if this had been one of my marketing projects. I thought of all the hours the writer put into the content of that letter and all the hours it took that writer’s bosses to approve and refine that content. If only that writer and his bosses could have seen firsthand that their prospect spent an entire half-second on their letter!

So, the padding was flipped up to reveal a piece of white cardboard inset in the box with some cut-outs that held what looked like a couple notebooks, a couple brochures, and at the very bottom, a baseball with a lot of black words printed on it.

“Looks like another development kit,” the box’s recipient said as his fingers quickly perused the items in the box until they landed on the baseball. “Well, at least my kids can play with the baseball,” he said as he closed the box. We all chuckled.

Just then, the elevator dinged that we were at floor “2”, the doors opened, and the three gentlemen exited the elevator as the guy who asked what was in the box said in a disappointed tone, “Aww, I was hoping it was something good.”

The elevator door closed and I spent the remaining trip up the next 5 stories in the elevator contemplating what I had just seen. I’d say the box, it’s custom design, all the printing, the baseball and the shipping put the per-piece price of that marketing mailer at $20 if they bought thousands of them, and more like $30 or $40 if it was a shorter run. If you’re a marketer, you know the months and months of work that can go into the creation of a piece like that – all of the hours of salaried and hourly work that triple or even quadruple the actual cost of an item like that.

And in the end, what was the result of all that work and money? The prospect’s kids got a free baseball and maybe – just maybe – the prospect will remember that time he got a home plate-shaped box with a baseball in it, though he probably won’t remember exactly which company sent it to him. “Some development company, I think,” he’ll say.