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A Foot in the Door |
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Can’t get a callback from a hot prospect? Maybe it’s time to be craftier in your approach. Here, three executives tell how the smart use of company promotional products helped them win new business.
That hard-to-get client you’re trying to reach has been ignoring you. What do you do? Bombard him with e-mails? Sit in the lobby where he works, hoping to get a moment with him as he’s strolling out for lunch? Beg and plead with his gatekeeper for a meeting? While these tactics may occasionally work, let’s face it: They’ll annoy most people and sap too much of your precious time.
Is there a better way to get a hot prospect to pick up the phone and return your call? You betcha. By sending out a crafty promotion (note the word “crafty”), you just may get a callback. Read on to see how three promotional pros won business from previously elusive clients.
Reving Up New Sales
Here’s a surefire way to get a callback: Send hot prospects a cool product that won’t function until they call you. That’s what Julie Aldrich, a Los Angeles-based promotional products consultant, recommended recently for a client - and the strategy worked. Aldrich’s client, a large mortgage broker, was trying to woo more small business clients. But few prospects seemed interested - that is, until Aldrich helped the bank launch a promotional campaign aimed directly at these hard-to-get customers. For the promotion, Aldrich’s team sent the bank’s small business prospects toy remote control cars - without the remotes or chargers. “Without these items, the cars were useless,” Aldrich says. “You couldn’t even roll them around.” The giveaway was in keeping with the message the bank wanted to convey, which was that without the help of the big banker, the smaller companies wouldn’t be as powerful.
The cars came with a hook: “We sent a catchy little card which said, ‘If you arrange a meeting with one of our salespeople, we’ll send along the power for your car, and you’ll learn what the power of a strategic alliance can do for you,’” Aldrich says.
The response was phenomenal, according to Aldrich. More than 60% of the recipients called asking for the remotes. “The car also proved to be an icebreaker for the sales callbacks,” she says. “As a result, our banker created over 150 new strategic alliances within the first year of the campaign.”
Aldrich says she learned two lessons from the promotion. The first was the value of two-phased promotions, where recipients have to respond to a salesperson before getting rewarded with a follow-up gift. The second? Promotional toys have their place in the business world. “You may think toys are silly, but people really respond to them,” she says.
“More Jelly Beans, Please”
Like Aldrich, promotional consultant Kathy Tank was working with a Fortune 500 banker who wanted to reach out to a group of independent brokers who could utilize its services. The bank wanted to create a direct mail campaign to motivate the brokers to call and get information on its products.
The promotional hook Tank and her client decided on was gumball machines filled with Jelly Belly candies. Along with the machine came a note asking the prospect to listen to a sales presentation.
The initial reaction was good - more than 20% of the prospects called to set up presentations. Following the presentations, salespeople waited a month or so to follow up with prospects - which was about the length of time it took for most people’s Jelly Belly supply to be exhausted. During the follow-up phone calls, the reps offered to restock their prospects’ supply of jelly beans, which helped “sweeten” the phone conversations and made it easier to arrange face-to-face meetings with the customer, according to Tank. Funny enough, “Some customers couldn’t wait to get their gumball machines restocked, so our client had to make special arrangements to see them ahead of time,” Tank says.
While the tactic certainly worked well, Tank cautions against refill overkill. “Restocking the same product will work three or four times for you,” she says, “but if you go beyond that, you may wear out your welcome.”
Tank has used the same technique with other products, including portfolios that require new writing pads and calendars that need yearly updates. “All of these campaigns are based on a continuity theme,” she says. “If you do them right they have value because they build brand awareness, keep your company visible in a client’s eyes and position you for face-to-face meeting opportunities.”
Some Like it Hot
Are some products so hot they’ll produce callbacks even when you’re not anticipating them? Lori Straughan, a promotional consultant based in Overland Park, KS, thinks so. She recently worked with a major trucking company that wanted to showcase a “hot service” theme to new prospects in the Gulf states.
The trucking company had barely sent out bottles of Captain Foods’ habañero pepper hot sauce (carrying the trucking company’s logo, of course) to qualified prospects when sales reps’ phones began ringing - off the hook. “The product was a lot hotter than we anticipated,” Straughan says. “All of a sudden the salespeople were getting callbacks from customers - busy executives, mind you - who wanted additional bottles of hot sauce.”
The hot sauce requests continued to roll in, and the salespeople were thrilled at the opportunity to deliver the product and make the callback. The promotion was so successful, Straughan says, that finally the company had to stop resupplying the hot sauce so that it could move on to the next phase of its campaign.
The number of hot sauce callbacks was a surprise, and helped generate one of the most successful campaigns Straughan ever launched. “We went from an anticipated 30,000-product campaign to over 50,000 units, and the results were phenomenal,” she says.
Looking back, Straughan notes that both the product and the way it was presented were keys to its success in opening doors. “It was a high-quality item you’d have a hard time finding in a store,” she says. “The product also had high-quality customized packaging with four-color graphics, which gave it a high-end image.”
Straughan’s food campaigns have continued, with barbecue sauce, steak sauce and popcorn, but no product has ever topped the callback popularity of the hot sauce.
Reprinted with permission of Successful Promotions, copyright 2006
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