Service provider qualifications bolster your marketing efforts
April 17, 2014
There’s no shortage of marketing gurus with innovative ways of warming up the prospect so you can get a meeting. But, I caution readers not to put too much hope in this as the silver bullet. It certainly isn’t.
Allow me to elaborate.
The way it supposed to work is that the prospective decision maker gets one or a series of cards, messages, gifts, or other items, even, over time, set up a micro-campaign to get their attention and have them think favorably of you.
Let’s say you or someone you hiring comes up with such a campaign and it works. What’s next? Well, first of all, you’d better have the goods. You have their attention, but when you finally get in front of them, you need to have the service provider qualifications necessary and be able to discuss them intelligently. You invested a lot into warming them up, now you have to dance and you better know how. You are fooling yourself if you think a warm contact will risk their job by not talking to a competitor. So, by all means, get those meetings, but that is the easy part. The hard part is delivering once you have their attention, and then keeping the account in the long term.
Further, when dealing with a mass market, which is where secure destruction is in the U.S. (and only in the U.S. by the way), attraction marketing is the only way to efficiently acquire that business. Remember, we are talking about 5,000 to 20,000 potential accounts. You can’t send them all a cupcake or a Valentine’s Day card.
Your website may well be the most important tool, and attention on having the right back of the house and front of the house mechanics should be a high priority. On the other hand, effective truck signage, electronic newsletters, driver intelligence, market profile development, and intense networking.
Spending time and money on gimmicks that get the attention of a particular contact is fine for what it is, but it is useless unless your firm has the proper qualifications and a salesperson who can discuss data destruction like an expert.