In a recent article, I wrote about sales growth in the face of the economic recession. I explained how market share consolidates in downturns and how smart marketers increase rather than decrease their marketing efforts to actually grow sales and market share.
Well, ‘guess I struck a nerve because I was flooded with suggestions and stories about how to do just that – grow in tough times. O.K., some of the suggestions were not so great, and some of them were technically illegal. But some of them were so good I decided to describe the 4 Best here:
1. “Scrub” your existing database of past clients and interested parties. This is really 3 ideas in 1. Three Ways to use your existing database of past clients and contacts effectively.
- Seek referrals – In The Referral Engine, John Jantsch masterfully describes how most companies fail to take advantage of their past successes by failing to solicit and use referrals. Word of mouth advertising has always been powerful and in today’s cyber-world it’s even more effective.
- More, not fewer “touches” – It’s tempting to cut back on marketing communications efforts as revenue and profits slip. However, inexpensive ways to touch past clients can be a great investment. After all, these people have already experienced your services and products. If you can’t get them to repeat or refer others, you’ve got some bigger issues. Take the time to communicate your gratitude, offer promotions and share information.
- Gather additional contact info – This has a two-pronged benefit, 1) you get a communication opportunity with past customers and 2) you improve your customer relationship management database. Get your team to greet/give/gather, as we call it. Greet your past clients and offer a new eBook, article, newsletter, describe a new service., etc. Then, gather additional contact information like mailing address, alternate phone numbers, social media contacts, etc. Also gather demographics like family size and buying-centric information. This step will make all your future marketing efforts to this client more effective.
2. Intense initial follow-up from trade show, promotion or seminar leads. All of us fall into the same trap – not doing a very good job of follow-up when we attend a large trade show or run a big promotion or attend a seminar and make tons of contacts. Often we let these opportunities slip away.
During the economic downturn, that’s not O.K. Those leads are precious and you should go the extra mile to milk them for all they are worth. One of our clients recently hired us to make the initial follow-up call to over 1500 leads he gathered from his booth at a national trade show. He was happy to get the 1500 database entries into his CRM that we provided, but THRILLED to get 100 real leads with “ready-to-buy” ratings.
3. Stop wasting your sales team’s time! This idea came from an internet marketer who had eight inside salespeople who spent half their time (his estimate) on very routine customer service support. Not good.
To free them up to do outbound calls and to be able to take more time per sales call, he outsourced the first level customer service function. Now, callers are directed to an outsourced call center for questions about shipping/tracking numbers, estimated delivery times, price changes, returns and etc.
4. Generate good warm leads by cold calling a targeted group. This is the one I wrote about recently. This one is a no-brainer since you and your team already know who your best customers are (hint: they are not the ones your team spends the most time with). Identifying these top customers and targeting lists of similar demographics can yield a ton of real good warm leads.
Growth always requires leads, in any economy. The best growth strategy starts with an abundance of leads so that your sales team can hone in on the best opportunities and deal with them confidently…not like there’s a scarcity of additional opportunities.
Cold calling (or cold contacting, as we call it) is an effective way to generate good leads. It always has been and always will be. It’s a critical step in the sales funnel – turning client “suspects” into actual prospects, worthy of your sales team efforts.
Keep your lead pipeline full and keep your best salespeople hard at work on the best real opportunities for sales. Now that’s a growth strategy for ANY economic environment.
Try some, or even all of these ideas to gain market share NOW.
