No matter what warm-up sales strategy you use in your managed services sales process, you must have an organized strategy for following up with the prospect after the initial contact. SO MANY salespeople give up after one or two attempts to follow up with a prospect – this is ridiculous!  Managed services has a long sales cycle; if you give up too early you are just setting yourself up for failure.

Keep in mind that you are trying to reach a very busy businessperson, and you are interrupting them to try to get their attention. The likelihood of you getting in touch with them on the first shot is very slim. You need to follow a specific follow up strategy that gives you the best chance at success, and doesn’t make you look like a stalker. I would suggest something like this:

5 days after initial deliver/contact – Phone call
+2 business days – Email
+2 business days – Phone call
+3 business days – Email
+2 business days – Email
+3 business days – Final phone call

If you haven’t reached your prospect at this point, they probably aren’t interested right now and you should make a graceful retreat – for the time being. Leave them a message saying something along the lines of,

“It must be a very busy time for you right now, which I understand. Please take down my name and number and give me a call if you can free up some time. Otherwise, I’ll stop trying to reach you for now.”

Leaving messages

Whether or not to leave voicemail during your phone call attempts is the point of much debate in the sales industry. I’m not going to take a strong position on when or when not to in this guide, but I will tell you one thing for sure: If you are going to leave a message, make it a good one!

As the CEO of a company, I get a lot of sales calls. I also get a lot of voicemails from salespeople. Most of them are horrible!

When I say horrible, I am not suggesting that the salesperson needs to have a perfect script for leaving a voicemail. What I am suggesting is that if you are going to leave a voicemail, it should be:

• Professional sounding
• Clear
• Slow enough that I can actually hear what you are saying and write down notes
• Repetitive – give your name and phone number multiple times throughout the message; it is such a pain in the neck when somebody gives it once quickly at the beginning of the message and I have to replay the message three times to get their name and phone number written down!

And finally…whatever you do…don’t try to guilt the person into calling you back; I can’t believe how many people try this!

“Mike, I’ve got something really important to discuss – I don’t know why you won’t call me back…”

It makes me 100% sure that I DON’T want to call them back, and that they’ll never get my business.

If you are going to leave messages, be clear, professional, and courteous.

MRC

Before you do your cold-calls, make sure to warm up the managed services prospects so that they take your calls and listen more openly.  In my past two posts, I talked about several warm-up tactics.  Here’s another effective one – drop offs.

Drop offs are very similar to the lumpy mail concept we covered earlier, but instead of being mailed, they are delivered in person by the salesperson. Delivering them gives the salesperson the opportunity to do a little bit of discovery while at the client’s office, and sometimes meet with the prospect immediately.

I don’t know who originally created this strategy, but I learned it from a District Sales Manager at ADP.

If you aren’t familiar with ADP, they are a nationwide giant that provides a variety of services to small businesses – largely focused around payroll and HR administration outsourcing. My understanding is that they have somewhere in the neighborhood of 15000 sales reps out in the field! We all have something we can learn from them.

ADP uses drop offs very successfully to help their salespeople get in the door with new prospects. My contact at ADP says it’s by far the number one way they go about getting appointments with prospects; that’s enough for me to hear. Specifically, for every 25 drop offs he does, he gets in the door with about two-thirds of those! Any salesperson would kill for those kinds of number!

How do you use drop offs? It’s very simple:

1. Identify a target list of prospects – I would keep this to 30 prospects or less per salesperson per campaign
2. Identify a theme for your campaign messaging – examples could be “protection” or “security” if you are marketing a data protection service
3. Choose a product that:
   a. You can buy in bulk at an affordable price
   b. Is related to the theme you chose
   c. Will get the attention of the prospect
   d. And ideally is something they will want to keep around and us
4. Have it branded with your company logo if there is an affordable and appropriate way to do it – you can get this done with almost any product
5. Write a note or sales letter to go with the product
6. Deliver the product to the prospects office, addressed directly to the prospect you hope to meet with
7. Follow up the next week with phone calls and email, identifying yourself as the person that brought the gift and asking for an appointment

A very high number of people will accept your call or respond to your email, and a good number of those will agree to meet with you to discuss your services.

The more creative you are with these ideas, the better. Get a number of people in your company to brainstorm ideas and give a small reward for the best idea – you’ll come up with some very clever ones.

There are two very important things you should consider when using this strategy:

1. The number of drop offs a salesperson can reasonably do in a month is not a huge number perhaps 50 or so. However, the number doesn’t need to be huge, because this idea will get them in front of a very high percentage of their prospects.
2. You can afford to spend considerably more money on each of the drop offs (as compared to the “lumpy mail” concept or other similar marketing tactics due to the high success rate. Keep in mind the concept of Total Lifetime Value when you develop your campaigns and spend enough money per drop off to give them some real firepower.

To illustrate, if you were running a campaign about security or a managed back up service, you could have your salespeople deliver a nice padlock, or you could spend more money and have them deliver a personal fireproof mini-safe.

So, which warm-up tactic gets you the best return for your money? You’d have to test and measure the ROI to be sure, but my bet is that the personal safe would get your salespeople in front of a dramatically higher number of prospects.

MRC

In my previous post, I talked about the importance of “warming up”  your managed services prospects so that your sales calls aren’t cold and, therefore, go more successfully.  I covered one warm-up tactic: lumpy mail.  Here are two more:

Send an article or report

Sending an article or a report to a prospect is similar to sending a sales letter, but it adds a degree of perceived value and thoughtfulness to your approach.

Put yourself in the prospect’s shoes. If you receive a letter from someone saying that they will be calling soon to introduce themselves, it has limited value – primarily just creating awareness – and is usually just a wasteful interruption of the prospect’s day. However, if you receive a report or article that’s of interest to you with a note attached that says “I thought you might enjoy reading this…” you now attach the value of the article or the report to the person that sent it to you.

As the salesperson, you are effectively “borrowing” the value of the article or report.

This is one of the easiest things in the world to do. You don’t have to be the genius that wrote the article or report – just find one, cut it out or photocopy it, and send it along to your prospect with a hand written note. Then follow up with a phone call to introduce yourself.

It’s best, but not necessary, if your handwritten note adds something of additional value to the article or report. If your note shows some thoughtfulness or expands on the ideas of the article or report, then you gain an extra degree of additional credibility with the client.

Invite them to an event

Inviting a prospect to an event can be one of the most enjoyable ways of warming up an initial contact. People love to leave the office to do something different every once in a while, and they particularly enjoy it if it’s on somebody else’s dime, makes them feel important, and is entertaining.

The number of things you can do here is unlimited, and really depends on the time and money you want to put into the event, as well as the one-on-one time you hope to achieve with each prospect at the event.  Totally different call versus calling in to speak to a cold prospect with nothing but your elevator pitch in hand!

For example, a popular use of the “invite someone to an event” strategy is taking someone to see a local professional sports team. Salespeople and business development people have been doing this for ages for one reason – it works! The downside is that this can be pretty expensive; the upside is that it takes virtually no effort to plan and it gives you great one-on-one time with your guests.

As an alternative, we have used events such as Small Business Roundtables in which we’ll invite a number of small business executives – say 10 or so – to a private event at a nice hotel conference room so we can ask them their thoughts about business trends, use of technology, etc.

We position these events in such a way that the business executives feel honored to be invited because we are acknowledging them as experts and influential in their local business community. During this type of event, we do very little in the way of selling our services, but we get a ton of good connections, build good relationships with influential people, and get good one-on-one time with prospects for the several people on our staff that we’ll have attend. The sales flow naturally as a result of the impression we made on our prospects.

Finally, we have put on many local seminars of our own about topics related to small business technology. We have been able to attract anywhere from 10 to 25 qualified prospects to these types of presentations.

Seminars such as this serve as an excellent way to position your company and your people as thought leaders and experts. They can cost a significant amount to host, and they don’t give you as much one-on-one time with the prospects, but they do serve as a great way to impress a significant number of prospects.

No matter what the event, it’s nice for a salesperson to have an invitation to extend to a prospect; it feels like you are giving them a gift. This makes for a totally different call versus calling in to speak to a cold prospect with nothing but your elevator pitch in hand!

For more information on marketing seminars, see our post from February 26.

MRC

Ideally, you should find a way to “warm up” every call you make to a managed services prospect, so it isn’t really a cold call. Most people find this creates a much more comfortable prospecting environment because it gives them a reason to call the prospect.

What exactly does “warm up” a call me?

It means a number of things:

• The prospect has heard of you before the call
• The prospect was expecting your call
• You have a specific reason to call that is of interest to the prospect
• You’ve already done something of value for them that triggers a sense of reciprocation
• You have a relationship with them that is of interest

You get the point. It doesn’t have to be all of these things at once – any single factor will help – but the more you have, the better off you are.

When these factors exist, the call is less cold. The prospect is more receptive to hearing from you, and you are usually more comfortable with contacting them.

If you believe, like I do, that the far majority of managed services sales will happen in a face-to-face meeting with a prospect, then the point of all of these tactics is to help the salesperson get a meeting. If you are an owner or Sales Manager reading this, it is critically important to involve your salespeople in the decisions around these campaigns so they are confident that what is being sent represents them well and helps them get in the door.

Specific tactics for warming up the call

Send a sales letter with “lumpy mail”

A very common sales strategy for warming up a prospect is to send them a letter first, then place the follow up call referencing the letter.

There are many theories of what the letter should be about. One of the most famous books that discusses this technique is called “Selling to V.I.T.O.” by Anthony Parinello. It goes into great detail about what specifically should be in the letter and how it should be used.

I’m less concerned about the specif ics of the content of the letter. I am more concerned that it gets the prospects attention, gets opened, and is memorable.

For these reasons, I highly recommend using what’s called “lumpy mail”. Lumpy mail is just as its name describes – lumpy. An example would be an envelope that has something large stuffed inside of it.

Because of the odd shape the envelope takes because of what’s inside, the piece of mail is lumpy and really stands out from others in the stack of mail. This almost guarantees that it will be looked at.

If it gets looked at, it’s very likely that it will be opened. And if it gets opened, and you put something interesting inside, it is very likely to be memorable.

Let’s assume all of this has happened. How much easier is it for the salesperson to now call and say, “Did you like the X I sent you?” or “This is Mike, I’m the person that sent you X”?

It’s much easier! Your salesperson is more confident and having more fun because they had something specific to reference and the prospect is more likely to welcome your conversation out of a sense of reciprocation.

There are a million ideas on how to use lumpy mail. The best resource I’ve found for ideas is the website www.3Dmailresults.com. They will send you a free course on how to using lumpy mail, and they can serve as your source for “lumpy” products.

Get their free course and study the principles of how to use lumpy mail effectively, and then get creative with how you execute on the concept; there really is no limit to the number of things you could do.

This technique is one of the best ways to leverage your time. You can reach a huge number of people with direct mail, and by using “lump mail” techniques, you can make sure that what you are doing will stand out in the mind of your prospect. Once you’ve found a campaign that works, you simply repeat it over and over again.

I’ll cover other “warm up” tactics in my next posts – stay tuned!

MRC

One of the most important things a salesperson can learn about selling managed services, or any high value product or service for that matter, is to make sure that you have something of value to talk about when you call.  Nothing is worse that calling someone and doing the old “Just checking in…” routine.  You are wasting your time, wasting your prospects time, and making it seem as if you are nothing but a transactional machine.

You want to give the opposite impression.  You want the prospect to see you as someone with expertise and value to add to their lives.

To ensure that we are making the right impression and adding value in every managed services sales call, we try to follow the principle of V.I.P. selling. V.I.P. selling means that every conversation we have with a client should meet the V.I.P. criteria:

1. It should add VALUE
2. It should create INTEREST
3. It should POSITION your company and yourself as a thought leader and trusted resource

Perhaps not every call will accomplish all three, but you should always get 2 out of 3. This means that calling to “just check in” is not acceptable – it’s a waste of an opportunity to have a more engaging interaction with your prospect!

Instead, call with an introduction to somebody else they would want to know, or tell them about an interesting event, or a great article you read about their industry.  Something…anything…to make the call more relevant to the prospect.

MRC