Deal qualification process for building services

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hey Robin Robins here founder of technology marketing tool kit.com where we specialize in working with managed service providers VARs IT service companies to get more customers and better quality ones and in this video I'm going to be talking about something that's extremely important to anybody who wants to go out and get more and better quality customers and that is how do you build a responsive list that's the key word here is responsive because if you're going to go out to market your services you need somebody to send your marketing to and in order to do that you need a list now some marketing doesn't require a list like if you're doing Google Adwords or if you're on LinkedIn and you're running ads on LinkedIn or Facebook ads or you're running radio ads you're not getting a list basically you're advertising in these areas and hopefully you're using direct response marketing to generate leads coming back in that's a key thing using direct response but if you're going to be doing email marketing or telemarketing or Direct Mail which is direct marketing you want to have a list on a list of qualified prospects who are interested in what you have to say because if you think about this marketing success if it was a hundred percent about fifty percent of the of the success of any marketing campaigns is dependent on the quality and the responsiveness of the list and a lot of the responsiveness has to do with making sure you're targeting the right people with the right message and it's also the relationship that list has with you 25 percent is copy and presentation so it design what is copy meaning for example if I get you send out a direct mail piece what is the what does the letter say is there a good headline is there a good opening is there a call to action that's the offer call CTA is call to action you got to have an offer and then 5% or other factors so you can see that having a really good quality list that's responsive is critical to your success particularly in the world of email marketing because I've worked with a lot of companies that have a big email list but they have very very low response rates so you know in most in the industry if you look around most email broadcasts you're gonna get maybe about a twenty percent 18 to 22 percent open rate is considered pretty good pretty average about a 2 to 3 percent 5% maybe click-through rate is considered pretty good or average and then depending on the site that once they get there the conversion can be anywhere from 20 percent 30 percent 50 percent again depending on whether that that matches up perfectly or not alright and so the thing you got to realize though if you want that great lists are built they're not bought and here's what I mean by that a lot of a lot of IT firms when they're looking to do marketing they go out to info USA and they ors AppData or pick one you know sales genie some of those sites and they buy a list and they download it and it looks really good on paper these people look like oh my god these are gonna be great prospects and they send out direct mail or they start calling or they might get their email address which i don't recommend buying email addresses and they find out they're not getting anywhere they're not getting any response people are basically ignoring them so here's what you gotta understand I'm gonna take a little different viewpoint that I've not really talked about list this in this way before and this might make that light bulb go on but there's two ways to build a list okay one is I'm calling a forced get and one is a consensual get okay now as you might think consensual is going to be better by forced get what I mean is you have somehow obtained that prospects name phone number mailing address maybe even their email address and they did not give it to you they didn't hand you a business card they didn't opt-in on your website that's called a forced get now in some cases you need that so like for example if we were marketing to let's say medical firms in the Nashville area or hospitals in the Nashville area you're not going to get you've got to work on getting consent from the decision makers of those entities in order to be on your list so in the beginning you might compile a list by either online directories or by telemarketing or networking or however you might get you might compile through a force ket so you can do direct response marketing direct mail telemarketing etc to try and get their consent to or permission that's Seth Godin big permission marketing to opt in to your list and give and they give consent for you to communicate with them so again force get is when you buy or you rent a list telemarketing is obviously you have a telemarketer call if your client of mine there's the cleaning and qualifying a cold script that's an excellent list or a list building script that you can get the name of the decision maker you can find out if they're outsourcing their IT support or not you can sometimes get their email address linked in prospecting canvassing and online directories and research and all of these things combined you can get a forced getting list you know in other words just a bank of names and addresses and again you might have their phone number you might have their email you might not a consensual get is much better and you're gonna find that if you had two lists and one you just compiled it by the means I showed you and one was compiled by using direct response marketing to a list to get people to respond that's a lead to say hey I want to be on your webinar I want to download this white paper or I want to meet with you I want a free IT assessment and consultation or something like that you're gonna find that this consensual list which is a direct response list is going to be far far better you're gonna get better response better by everything else and this is what you really want to build okay so hear me out again the force get list you might have to compile that in order to do direct response to get the consensual get and when someone opts in on your website that they're giving you consent they're saying I'm interested I want to get whatever it is on that site whether it's a free report a video and audio or whatever so they opt in in some manner on your website even subscribing to your newsletter in other ways they give you their business card so you meet them at a networking event trade show they give you their business card they're saying hey you know give me a call contact me that's giving consent that they want to hear with you they might register for a webinar or a seminar that you're holding either at somebody else's venue so they're opting in to register for your webinar that you're holding maybe in conjunction with a JV partner or you're doing it on your own okay and then they respond in some manner with the intent engage so there might be other ways I just didn't think about as far as you know how they may have responded but again your goal is not just to build a list of names okay that might be that's step one in a lot of cases then what we need to do is get consent for marketing and this goes even more so with email marketing because I know all of you want to get an email list right because the email is cheap it's fast you don't want to do direct mail you don't want to do telemarketing that costs money I get it but in order to get somebody's email and and get them to respond you've got to get their consent alright and the way you do that is as follows so first of all you got to get crystal clear on who you want as a client because what that's going to determine is what your marketing messages in the in the communications that are going out to try and get their permission right so you got to get crystal clear on who you want as a client second you want to create a series of educational direct response marketing campaigns both online and offline that's that force to get list I was talking about to entice those prospects to opt in again to give you their information so you can continue to mark market to them or engage with them in some manner so that's what you're doing using all different kinds of direct response and that can be again LinkedIn telemarketing direct mail radio ads it could be trade shows it could be canvassing any of those things but the the marketing you send out to that force get list should get them to respond and give consent so they can be on your house list and they're gonna be far more responsive and then the next key is to constantly drip strategic useful and interesting content so you keep them engaged because not every prospect you meet with or engage with or that opsin or comes to a webinar who's ready to buy right now so you've got to stay in touch with them and the worst way to stay in touch with them is to be calling them saying hey it's Robin from the IT shop here in Nashville you know we talked about a month ago about our IT services they're really good and I was just wondering are you ready to buy yet then you wait another 30 days and hey this is Robin from the IT shop hey it's pretty hot out there today isn't it yeah okay hey I'm just wondering are you ready by yet no I'm not you know that's called being an annoying pest alright so in order to keep that list engaged you want to make sure that you're constantly dripping strategic useful interesting content to them because even these prospects that you get on your consensual list maybe they've consented they want to hear from you they want to you they want you to market to them if you don't send interesting and useful content they're gonna opt out and they're gonna ignore you and then it's gonna have the opposite effect so it's really really critical that when you're doing marketing you're not just constantly doing the by now by now by now you're actually giving something of value and you see me doing that that's why I'm shooting these videos because hopefully you're getting some value from this now of course we want to sell things we want to sell toolkits we want to sell seminars we want to sell consulting and coaching of course we want to do that but if all I ever did was send you sales letter sales letter sales letter without offering something of value you very quickly opt out and our opt out rates are very very low we have an extremely responsive list and that's why all right so as a reminder again if you're a client of mine here's another value add we're mate we're doing and that is a two day fast implementation workshop we're doing six of these all across the country it's two full days of working on the marketing we're gonna actually help you implement the toolkit or the blueprint or the marketing that you know you need but you still haven't implemented yet we're gonna be working on things like how to how to define your target market click to clarify that how to define a unique selling proposition we're gonna do extensive sales training so I'm going to show you how to close sales faster and easier with less angst and a host of other things so make sure you get over to IT marketing Roadshow com register they're free if you're a client of mine if you're not a client of mine we can fix that too okay but if your client might definitely get over to one of these events and register and join me at that ok see you at the event you