Executing this one strategy well greatly increases your chance of success.
Increase your ROI by focusing on the best of the best.
Couple of recent events again demonstrated how getting just one thing right – can almost guarantee marketing and sales success. Get it wrong – even if you do everything else right – and you are doomed to failure.
Two examples.
#1. A current coaching client scheduled 6 solid sales appointments (her previous average was 2) during the 2nd week of working with me on scripts, responses, call process, organization, coding and more. In response to “What do you think contributed most to that result?” she said, “The 5, 6, 7 coding system.”
What’s that? Very simply… as you prospect you stumble across suspects that are worth more of your time than others. These are “special” and coded 5. Others, with a higher level of worth are “priority” and coded 6. The most urgent – don’t let this one fall through the cracks whatever you do – are “hot” and coded 7.
What that means is that as you call, call and call hundreds of companies, you can quickly call up those records you have deemed more worthy of your time and expend more effort on them – without flubbing around or wasting time scrolling through your database looking for important records to call. What a waste.
Example #3. Marketing my newly launched public seminar series. Using a database tool I looked up my top 100 purchasers of the past year and built a profile of them by SIC code, employee size range and revenue range.
Surprise surprise! It was discovered that 60%+ of my revenue was derived from just two SIC code ranges (an SIC code… Standard Industrial Classification… is assigned to every business type… you search for other companies that match your best clients by comparing SIC codes, employee and revenue ranges). Very simply those that look like your current best clients are most likely to buy from you. The farther you vary from this profile the less successful your marketing is likely to be. The problem was that for my first seminar just 15% of my mailers were directed to these segments.
Let’s see. Direct just 15% of your marketing money toward targets that deliver more than 60% of your revenue and 85% of your marketing money toward targets that generate less than 40% of your revenue. A great way to lower your ROI or lose your shirt.
Armed with this data I was able to generate lists for future mailings with 100% of my investment being directed at the most responsive industry targets. As results come in I will test other segments to generate the highest return on investment.
The lesson? 60% of the reason that your marketing and sales efforts are successful is due to just hitting the right targets. Get this right and you can screw up a lot and still make money. Skip this step or select your targets poorly and you are guaranteed to fail.
Do you think that everybody could be your client?
Do you fail to focus your limited time and financial resources where it will do you the most good, because you “don’t want to miss anyone”, have no time or don’t know how? Then when it comes to generating sales and marketing results you are among the walking dead – you just don’t know it.
In example #1 greater prospecting results were achieved by easily being able to invest more time with more valuable suspects. In the seminar example, more money was allocated to more responsive targets and less to lower probability targets – all after just a few hours of research.
You always have more quality suspects to communicate with than you have time or money to do so. Make sure your time and money is always directed toward your highest ROI targets. You want to focus on the best of the best.
60% of the reason you will be successful is due to this one factor.
Best wishes for sales and marketing success.
Scott Channell
