Direct Mail Formatting Recommendations

Often we'll be asked about putting together a mailing, that' supposed to generate interest in either a technology assessment or seminar.

And just the fact that the consultant is thinking about measurable end-results from the direct mail campaign, as opposed to lame institutional me-me-me advertising, is a huge step in the right direction... although not necessarily the total answer either.

The concept of a soft offer is something that everyone should be looking to embrace.

It’s very difficult to take someone who has never heard of you and try to immediately sell them on a $350 technology assessment, or try to immediately sell them on a $25,000 LAN upgrade, or try to immediately sell them on $1,000 a month maintenance agreement.

You’re going to, in most cases, fall flat on your face because you need to get over that know-like-and-trust hurdle before you can capture their attention. You need to prove that you know what you’re talking about. You need to prove that you understand their problems and that you can provide a solution to that.

So, everything in your early efforts with generating demand should be around some kind of soft offer. In terms of generating interest for a technology assessment, or a seminar, what mailing format works best? I’m partial to the postcard. There are a couple of reasons why.

1. Using a postcard forces you to be extremely concise, which is really important because you don’t have a lot of time or a lot of attention with people that have never heard of you on the first inbound contact.


2. You don’t have to worry about the envelope being opened – it’s already open.


3. Postcards minimize your printing and postage costs.
   

What should you do in terms of the mechanisms to get it to work the best? If you’re just going to do a very simple 4x6 type of postcard, you probably want to have them fax back their business card with the postcard on a piece of paper or some kind of response.

If you’re doing a larger postcard, you typically can have space for them to write in their information and fax that back.

You may want to drive them to a custom web landing page that’s a modified version of your contact form.

There are a couple keys best practices for best results.

• Get your qualified questions answered there.


• Make sure that you’re using some kind of tracking mechanism – a cookie-based mechanism, or analytics package - so you can see out of how many clicks that you got how many resulted in your contact forms being filled out, and that was ultimately used to either register for interest in a technology assessment or sign up for a seminar. A lot of people have used 24-hour voicemail boxes successfully. You basically want to phrase it that way because what you want to do is make sure that the people you’re trying to contact, the non-technical small business owners and managers, understand they’re not going to need to talk to a salesperson that early on in a sales cycle.
  
  Put yourself in their shoes. When you’re first researching something new or you've have something that crosses your desk, is the first thing that you say, “Gee, I want to sign up so that I get a phone call from a sales person every single week nagging me and asking me when I’m ready to buy.” Of course not!
  
  They want to be somewhat anonymous. They want to capture this information early on so they can have it to mull over. The whole idea here is you want to get to someone much earlier on in the sales cycle, long before they’re out price shopping, or long before they've just made a commodity purchase.
  
  Remember, the huge benefit of the postcard is the envelope equals a barrier.

A key thing to keep in mind is that the copy – the words that are on your postcard – are going to be infinitely more important than image, or any kind of pictures, or any kind of ego-trappings that you may think about putting on there.

Don’t worry about bragging about certifications or channel program affiliations, or anything like that. You want to focus on their problems and your solutions to their problems, whether it is in the form of a seminar you’re holding, or a technology assessment that you can do for them, or a special report, or a white paper.

The key thing to keep in mind is that a postcard has a lot of tremendous benefits over doing anything that’s going to be stuffed into an envelope.

Remember, focus on selling the soft offer (seminar, white paper, guide, etc.) and make it so your recipient can reply without having to talk to a salesperson.

Attracting Qualified Leads with 10-50 Workstations

We're often asked, "What’s the best and quickest way to identify companies that have between 10 and 50 PCs, in other words, qualified leads?"

The goal is to primarily market to those small businesses that have between 10 and 50 PCs, in other words, companies that are qualified leads for Sweet Spot Clients™.

These companies are just beyond the micro-small business, and not large enough to likely have a large in-house IT department.

In every initial contact that you make, you need to ask the basic qualifying questions.

It doesn't matter whether you ask these questions by phone or on a contact form that’s on your website, but you should be asking things like:

• Where are you located? (to weed out geographically undesirable prospects)

• How many computers do you have? (to weed out prospects that are too small... mainly)

• What platform do you predominately run? (You may want to ask what type of software they run as opposed to what platform because non-technical, small business owners generally won’t know what an operating system is or what a platform is. )
  
  But, if you ask them what type of software they run and you give them a dropdown list, they can probably pick out from a lineup things like Windows, or Netware, or Linux, or Mac, or something like that. You want to make sure that there’s a good match there.

• How have you gotten support in the past?

• Who’s supporting your IT needs right now?
  

Those types of questions should be on a web-contact form. If you have a receptionist or someone else who answers your inbound calls, that should be on his or her inbound calling script – those five key questions as they’re gathering information - because it’s a much more efficient way of doing things.

If you have some kind of faxable info gathering form that you either have people download from your website, or that you fax out to people that you speak with, or that you email out to people that you speak with – a PDF, or something like that that they’re going to complete and fax back to you, those kinds of questions should be in there.

There’s a great time-saving template in Module 2 of the Computer Consulting Kit™ Home Study Course that you really need to embrace, modify and adapt for your business to make sure that you’re capturing these key pieces of information, so you’re working as efficiently as possible in your marketing.

If you’re going out to an expo and you’re doing some kind of drawing for a door prize, you can certainly ask a limited subset of questions.

If you’re having a seminar – some kind of informative seminar, either like this, a teleseminar or webinar, or even better yet, a live seminar – you can certainly capture some of this information on live seminar registrations and end-of-session feedback surveys.

Besides improving your lead qualification, if you belong to a Chamber of Commerce, they should certainly be able to point you in the right direction for the number of employees because most Chambers of Commerce organizations base their membership dues on how many employees a particular company has.

Another option for looking at size issues... Talk to anyone that’s involved in the mailing list industry, like mailing list brokers, or mailing list compilers.

It’s very important with all of this that you remember your qualifying questions at all times.

Now, you want to make sure there’s a good platform match.

You want to make sure that you can take care of them geographically and that they’re not too far away from your central location so you’re not burning up a lot of non-billable time, or low-billable time driving around.

And, you want to find out how they’re getting their support today, and how were they supported the past.

To learn more about Attracting Qualified Leads with 10-50 Workstations, be sure to sign-up for the free sample tips and excerpts now at http://www.computerconsultingkit.net/