Quick Note for Offline Marketers...

LOL... as I have been saying for quite some time now...

Hey Andrew,

I think that the reason dentists are such popular 'targets', for want of a better word is that during the boom days of direct marketing (before IM confused things) - there were an awful lot of people talking about dentists and chiropracters.

If you have specialist knowledge, then I get why people might do it, but really, there are an awful lot more opportunities out there.

Hey Brandon,

That's been my experience too.

I don't do any cold-calling so I haven't experienced it like that - but I do always ask business owners I speak to what their experience of others has been.

I think the trend to target dentists etc. is much like the old keyword chasing when people would get into Adsense chasing terms like Mesothelioma because it was a high paying keyword rather than because they knew anything about the industry or had anything useful to offer.

There's also a lot of information being sold to people about marketing to offline businesses and much of it is sold by people who don't really understand the business and they're creating the information to sell to IMers so they want to make it sound profitable and easy - therefore they focus on 'high paying' clients and niches so that people will think it all makes sense and want to buy their information.

It's a lot like telling people to use PPC because it's quick and easy to get traffic and traffic = money.

But in reality PPC is one of the quickest ways to waste money when you don't actually understand the business.

People fall for this IM focused information and then run around sending postcards and cold calling dentists because that's what someone else told them to do.

If people just use their own brain and common sense they would get much better results and actually be working with businesses who are looking for their help or came to them from a recommendation rather than the normal blast stuff out and hire cold-callers to fill up your funnel.

People make this stuff much harder than it should be because they rely on others to tell them how to run their business.

Andrew knows the score with this - businesses are happy to give you good money to help them, but when you get your model right you don't need to hard sell your services. It's just a result again of people wanting quick easy money and looking for the short cuts.

Andy

There is an on-going problem offline & in the IM word in that the most successful marketing people are sometimes the people who are best at selling themselves, rather than their clients.

Also - be aware that people do hate getting bad telesales calls. It's best to have a mixture of online & telesales.

For my clients I normally suggest something like this:

1. Online info / SEO / etc
2. Driving people to a 'landing page' - (even though this might say - free white paper on xxx or free trial of our system)
3. Get this to feed a CRM system as well as a auto-responder - to track what's going on much closer. SugarCRM and vtiger are both great and free
4. Manually make contact - this way the call goes much better - "You said you were interested in... is this still the case?"
5. Go for a live demo of the system / product etc
6. Remove the people who are wasting time etc.

With this, you combine the best of online & offline. I do this for a few people and they are super happy with it. But - it does take time to get it all working well and many people can find it painful to fix it all.

I Should Have Mentioned This...

I am NOT the person the dentist said this to. It was someone else. I just wanted to share what he said.

Brandon

Hitting the local business market is the same as cold calling door to door. Some will buy and some won't.

If you hit the prospect with a hard sell then they won't buy. Let's not forget that we all hate to be sold too.

Time to realize that the numbers have to be done and with a decent sales approach conversions will come.

I do not "SELL" anything.
I help my clients find what they are looking for.

Hugh

Funny story really. A neighbor of mine once got so tired of cold calls and calls from debt collectors that he began answering his phone “City Morgue.” The people would think they still had the correct number and ask for him, he’d then pause and pretend like he was looking around for who they were asking for (himself.) and would respond by saying “No sorry, there’s no one here by that name, try the morgue at such and such a location.”