What's with all the chasing?

No doubt the hardest part of offline marketing for me. Waiting on customer responses. I look forward to some suggestions from other marketers.

There has to be a fine line between pestering the customer too much and possibly coming off desperate or having them fall out of your sales funnel do to lack of communication. I try to get ALL potential customers into my auto-responder list so that they get small nuggets of info about my other products in between my actual attempts to follow-up directly.

Appearing busy seems to help. Never seem too desperate to close the deal. I only work with a small number of clients per niche in my market, so you might be able to use the urgent close telling them that you will be pursuing clients in their niche in their market (if exists).

I think what you need to do is take a deep breath and relax. Also you don't ask the business owner when there free to meet. You tell them (For example: Ok how does monday at 3pm sound or tuesday at 2pm?)

Keep the ball in your court. Also don't come off as desperate. If you don't hear back from a client for a few days leave them one message and a follow up email. Calling 1-10 times and leaving emails only shows your desperate.

Hope these ideas help you in your future dealings with business owners!

Making the client want to come to you and court *you* as opposed to the other way around....it's 'way more difficult but makes life far more easier.

Lots of empathy for what you're dealing with - that's one reason why I shun offline marketing now for the most part. People have to actively pursue me before I consider taking on clients.

I like the idea of communicating, "You're one of the three clients in XYZ I will be contacting" - scarcity/urgency of services sometimes makes a much deeper impression than standing there, asking to be engaged.

Hope things turn around soon!

I think as long as you continue the "proposal" method of selling, you're going to have this problem. Odds are that there is a lot of similarity from one sale to the next....don't get offended by that, I know you want to treat each client as being special, but you'll get over that.....you need to start going IN with a proposal and closing them on the spot or get used to having to remind them who you are everytime you manage to get them back on the phone.

I think the issue here is one of qualifying your prospect. Not everyone, or even most of the people you talk to, deserve to or will qualify to be a client of yours. This is the hardest thing for anyone doing sales to get over: they want to turn everyone into a customer.

What you want to do is find prospects that have urgent, white-hot need for what you offer! These prospects will be chasing *you*! Do not chase the rest. You'll waste your energy and get discouraged, as you have.

Just a thought. It could be also that you're being tested. They're obviously throwing crap at you (can I say "crap" here?) - it could even be unconscious on their part - but the message you're sending back whether their actions are intentional or not, is that you don't fight for what you want. If that's the message you're sending, how can they believe in your ability to get them where they want to go so as to sign with you?

Fight back. Fight back by taking control and leading them. Then if they want to bail, let them go. But let this be on your terms, not theirs.

This happens to us...all...the...time. It's the nature of the beast. There little tricks and things to try and motivate your prospect to pull the trigger, but in the end, they're on their own schedule.

We've had prospects call us 6 months later and then do work. I've got clients that I take a $2k check and then I don't hear from them for 3-4 months, then they're finally ready to get started.

Doing 2 follow-up emails and 1 phone call/voicemail each week is the formula that I have my team follow. They're clearly interested in our services, or we wouldn't have gone this far with it. But we understand they get busy.

It's about filling your pipeline, you mention 3 above - but what if you had 20 businesses all on the verge. Eventually they'll all start to close. Continue to fill your pipeline and add more people in there. Continue to schedule kick-off meetings with your prospects to get them to sign.

Something to remember, as you've learned already: Others are calling. These business owners are getting 5-10 calls a week from other marketing companies. If you've already done the legwork to open them up and listen to you, don't loose that momentum. Always keep your name at the tip of their tongue when they're ready to pull the trigger.

What type of attitude are you radiating towards your prospects? Picking up prospects is a lot like asking a woman out for dinner. It's all about confidence. If you can exude that you'll get your conversions up.

Also you need to make absolutely sure you are asking for the sale on every one of the proposals you're submitting out.

When I first got into sales back in the pre-Internet days I was very adept at finding prospects to submit proposals to. But I damn near starved my family to death because I wasn't asking for the sale.

My sales manager took me aside getting ready to fire me and when he saw how many proposals I had submitted his eyes bulged out.

We sat in his office and called every prospect and simply asked them for their business. Of the 150 prospects I had we closed 25 sales that day. Which was exactly what my monthly quota was.

I was too geared up towards submitting proposals. Once I learned a sale isn't a sale until you have a check in your hand my sales went up to the point where I became a legend (probably in my own mind) at ADT.

Go back to every one of your prospects and look them dead in the eye and tell them you're there to pick up their down payment.

If they tell you they're not ready to make a decision come back with "I know you're not. But with all due respect that's why you're in the position you're in now. I'm here to get you out of that position once and for all."

Then shut up and don't say another word until he/she speaks again. Even if it takes a minute of very uncomfortable silence. More often than not a a majority of the prospects you do this will come on board.

Trust me on this one.

Hrm...

1) If you have to chase them to secure the deal then you haven't made THEM want YOUR solution enough...which translates into meaning YOU did not get them emotionally charged enough to take action.

2) If they are giving you the run around--move on. Time is money too and wasting time chasing cheques can eat away at the value of that payment once you do receive it.

3) Make it clear from the start when you expect payment and maintain that positioning. Based on how you described your handling of clients, if I was the business owner you were dealing with, I'd feel like *I* ran the show...not you.

Make them realize they need you more than you need them.

Enjoy

~Dexx

How about this e-mail I just sent to this guy... is this the right tone to take with them??

Hi Jimbo,

Just shooting you this e-mail to provide you with my contact information.

Feel free to reply to this e-mail or call me at 555.5551.

It should take about 30-45 minutes to go over the proposal depending on whether or not you have any questions.

We will only take on one business per city. Meaning we will only take on one kitchen cabinet company in Timbuktu - since we don't want to have two of our clients competing for the same market share.

So, with that being said, we will need to have a decision by Friday of next week. The reason we do this is sometimes business owners keep putting it off which somewhat forces us to stay obligated to your business while still in limbo regarding a decision.

If you haven't made a decision by Friday - we will start to prospect for other kitchen cabinet companies in Timbuktu.

Even if you haven't made your initial decision by next Friday, and we have yet to take on a client in your industry, we will still be open to doing business with you.


Thanks,

James

Just thought I'd come in here and update what happened.

The guy ended up e-mailing me, which before I even ended up getting a chance to reply he was calling me.

I set up everything. I had put together a power point proposal which outlined everything he was looking for.

Met him at his business and sat down. He said just wait a minute, I'm going to get my dad.

Right when he said that I had a bad feeling.

The first time I was there, while I was walking out I met his dad, his son introduced me and told him what I do, and his dad simply replied - yeah, people love our website, whenever I show it to people.. they all say "wow, how'd do do that!?"

Haha, something about that just told me, this guy was out of touch.

Anyways, from the start - his dad continued to try and cause problems, pretending he was only playing devils advocate but honestly just being an old-timer out of place.

There are 900 searches a month for his services over the 3 main keywords and it's a kitchen cabinet company - so it's a pretty high-end sale they make.

The entire time the father would say, this isn't worth our money ($399/per month, 3 keyword SEO) following up with saying cold calling would be more effective... which, I never questioned him as to 'WHO?!?' he was going to call. I'm sure people would love to be sitting at home and be propositioned to have a brand new 6 000 dollar kitchen installed.

He assured me that websites are meant more so to supplement businesses and to send people to after your initial meeting..

To try and get him involved I asked him, if just 10% of those 900 searches per month turned into phone calls, how many phone calls are you looking at per month? Suprisingly, he got it right. 90. Perfect, and so if you bring that down to daily how many is that? 3. So, you've told me at the beginning of this meeting that you're currently taking on 4 clients per month, so don't you think that 3 phone calls a day could blow your business through the roof?? Are you even ready for that amount of business??

He would completely ignore that and change the subject as to how I used cold calling to secure the current meeting we were in, in which I turned around and said yes, but very few offline businesses understand the power of the internet, so there are very few searches for my services. Which is not the situation with your business at all. If you were only looking at 100 searches a month - I wouldn't have even come in here today.

Not to bore you people with it. But, he ended up excusing himself and practically laughing at me for even coming in.

I know we are here to help people. But, I plan on crushing them into the ground using another company as the sledge hammer!!!

Good Luck People!

Think about automating processes in terms of relationship management via
mail or social media. Do you have a proper sales funnel system with quantifiable qualifiers etc?