I've always been intrigued by the fact that you only get 1-3% customer conversion taking a cold prospect list as the basis.
If you start with a list of 100 companies, after finishing the prospecting work, you will obtain around 3 to 6 leads and 1 to 2 customers, that is, you are left with at least 94 contacted companies that have no interest in the product/service.
What occurs most frequently is the abandonment of these uninterested companies because of four factors:
- You engage with those who have shown interest, i.e. the leads you generate,
- You take care of the acquired customer(s),
- Every effort goes into improving that conversion in the next prospecting and
- There are no efficient systems to deal with those who have no interest.
These "not interested" companies have degrees of temperature, i.e. this "not interested" is relative.
Some say to contact you again in a few months, others ask for presentation material (pro-forma), others don't even answer or reply to any communication, others declare having no interest at all, in short there are shades of this "disinterest".
However, over the years I have realised that this contacted and unconverted audience can become a great asset, if worked on correctly.
Statistically, these companies will need your services and product in a given time. Companies change suppliers, have new needs due to strategic changes and are demanded by their markets. This is when the window of opportunity to buy what you sell opens.
My biggest challenge was to be in the minds, on the radar, of these companies, as soon as this window opened. They had my contact, we had already spoken at some point and I wanted to be remembered when the time of need came.
Email marketing and periodic calls came on the scene.
But unfortunately it didn't work. There was no new lead generation, besides the wear and tear of being presented as a "beggar" for business.
My plan was as follows: Anyone who was not interested at the time of the first sift (prospecting) would join a mailing list that received a monthly newsletter from my company.
Anyone who opened the newsletter was copied to a warmer list that would later (3 months or so) serve as input for a new prospecting/qualification call, i.e. a second sift.
It did not work for the following reasons:
- The newsletter was cold, with corporate clichés and centred on my company.
- I couldn't produce it on a regular basis.
- Opening rates were low and the numbers of low reliability.
The second sift, that is, my new attempt to qualify these prospects generated practically no concrete results, only, new promises.
There is also a big bottleneck which is in people's mailbox. An executive receives hundreds of emails a day. The chance of him considering (opening, reading and/or replying to) any newsletter is close to zero.
Another. There is no correlation, or if there is it is very tenuous, between email opening and purchasing behaviour.
An email with a catchy title will get a very good opening. This has little to do with interest in buying what you are selling.
In short, the opening rate is yet another distortion that distracts us from the essential: making ourselves present to those who are actually interested and can purchase what we sell.
