You lay awake at night dreaming about this marketing campaign – the one that was going to launch your new service to existing customers and brand-new prospects. You spent ages on the creative… ‘shall I include a teaser message with my letter? What will my special offer be and compelling call to action? Hmm, whilst I’m at it, I need to tidy up my website. The copy is looking a little stale. I must bring it up to date and add some sparkling news about my service and of course yes I do need to create some new pages’.
You invested in a fabulous B2B mailing list, spending some time whittling down the data that was available to you so that the prospects on the list really were hot prospects; brand-new customers in the making. You made sure that your customer database was up-to-date too. Heck you even had it professionally cleaned and augmented so there was no chance of mailing a prospect that was one of your customers.
Then, envelopes stuffed, website boasting a glittering array of substantiated superlatives you launched your campaign.
Ta dah! Time to let the world know about your new service.
What happened next? Well, you went back to work and forgot all about it.
Excuse me? You did what?
Well, work got in the way of handling the responses to your mailshot in a timely and customer focused manner. It’s fair to say that you didn’t brief your team neither so they were unprepared when the responses came flooding or trickling in. All they knew was that their workload was increasing because they were fielding higher levels of phone calls than normal plus alarmingly high numbers of completed contact forms from your website.
Okay, we are being a little dramatic in order to prove a point but the situation described is sadly oh so typical. Let’s look at it again but this time with the prospecting journey of a business at an exhibition. How many businesses spend a small fortune exhibiting at a B2B exhibition; rocking up on the day with the most amazing glitziest stand imaginable, all manner of promotional giveaways not to mention enough staff to fill an auditorium? A fair old few. They give it their very best shot at the exhibition, collect dozens of business cards and complete no end of hot prospect forms. What happens when they go back to work a few days later? Those forms and those business cards are stuck under a table or plonked in a filing cabinet until they are recycled.
Let’s face it, we are now in an era characterised by austerity and prudence. Businesses are still buying products and services from other businesses but we have to work that bit harder and smarter if we are to convert them. If you’re planning on launching a new service, are revamping your existing products or services and want to reach out to existing clients and cold prospects please invest in marketing (and please talk to us about your b2b list won’t you and for that matter cleaning your database?).
But don’t overlook the most important action of all.
Follow-up and don’t spare the horses.
If you ask a business owner, how many customers is enough, the answer will invariably be the more the merrier.
