Over the last couple of weeks we discussed the dumb mistakes that companies frequently make and tonight we are going to discuss yet another one. Too many of us are not persistent enough when trying to sell to a customer. We think no means no. No doesn’t mean no, it just means not at this very second. RH Macy failed 7 times before his department store idea caught on. Colonel Sanders knocked on 1008 restaurant doors before someone said OK, I’ll try your secret formula for 1¢ a piece of chicken.
Too many businesses rely entirely too much on hoping one advertisement, or one office visit, or one direct mailing will get the desired results. Success is not an event…it is a process. Processes take time. Therefore you should never put your faith in one ad, one mailing campaign, or one TV spot. You must commit to connecting with your prospects a minimum of 8 times. If you are not willing to do this and be this dedicated, then you shouldn’t even start to promote to those potential clients. You need to decide that you are willing to connect with your prospects time and time again and hit them with the same benefit packed points over and over again – from every conceivable angle – in a determined attempt to motivate your prospects to take action!
Remember that no single business or marketing event will generally produce outstanding results, not in today’s competitive market. It used to be true that you could make a fortune off of one ad, one promotion. But today, it’s just not going to happen very often, and you should NEVER plan on it. You must know precisely who you are targeting, what their desires are, and you must commit to connect with them again and again and again, until they either prove that they are not a prospect, or until they see that you have the best solution to address their problems. Any area of business requires persistency to say the least. You must work at it on a daily basis. Some days will be downright discouraging. But, you cannot give up. If you have done your homework, and you realize that you have the solution to your prospects problems, if you have focused precisely on your target, then you must not get discouraged. It can keep you from succeeding.
If your prospects are not responding then you need to refine your approach. You may need to reassess who you are trying to connect with. You may need to approach them from several different angles to find the approach that works the best… you will need to test constantly, always trying to improve your take. In short, you must persist so that your prospects never have the opportunity to forget who you are, and what you can do for them. The only way to discover your prospects hot-buttons are to test and to test continually.
You can’t predetermine what your marketplace wants, what the best price is, the best selling packaging, or the best approach. You have the obligation to find out from your market what it is that they want. The way to find out what they want is to have constant dialogue to narrow down their specific needs and then test one marketing approach against another, one ad concept against another, one headline against another, one TV or radio commercial against another, one price against another, and the list goes on and on! Testing is an ongoing process. The point is that you cannot guess what your market will buy.
Remember, Thomas Edison left school because the teachers said he wasn’t capable of doing the work. Michael Blake who wrote Dances with Wolves was rejected for 26 years before the book was finally published.