Your #1 Favorite Way To Generate Offline Leads Is.....

Mark,

How are you getting these printed?

Are you doing it at home with a color printer or are you having them printed at Kinkos or by an Internet printing company?

I have that magazine, curious how you deliver.

Thanks.

For me;

Most profitable per hour invested-speaking to groups of business owners.
Generates prospects easiest to close-referrals from happy clients
Most effortless to work with-clients coming after they see my work, and follow it to me.
Most profitable when the first three are not available-cold calling for speaking gigs.

Least desirable client- One who wants me to submit a proposal.

Yeah it is. Honestly its not with offline marketing products though...havent cracked that one yet. Its with brokering manufacturing deals on Alibaba.

I can email sellers and email buyers and put them together... I have made TONS of these sales through time, through email alone...because of language barriers with different countries doing biz... Alot of them prefer email communication.

I havent sold "websites" through email yet. But have sold literally hundreds (to put it in a believable form because its really alot more than hundreds...) of websites through telemarketing.

Well, yes it is cold emailing, but you probably wouldnt benefit directly from my way of doing it, however maybe inadvertently.

What I will do is cold call a list of manufacturers in a given niche, who always have millions of dollars in buy backs, surplus and liability assets laying around at the end of the year taking up warehouse space. This is product that they have written off as a loss, cant sell back to their primary market... and its costing them now in warehouse space... They dont want it going back out into their market even as "seconds".... they want it shipped to other countries far away from their primary market. They would rather throw it away- hundreds of thousands of units.

So I cold call them, find out what they have taking up warehouse space.

Create a brokering deal where I can sell it overseas for pennies on the manufacturing dollar...

They will have say a $20.00(retail) product and need to unload it so bad that they will take 30 cents per unit if you can get rid of the whole lot of say 50,000 units. (Less than manufacturing cost).

So I mark it up to 50 or 60 cents per unit... and then I go to Alibaba.com and I find people who are looking for large quantities (truckloads) of that kind of product. I create an email offer (template), and I manually email them one by one with the offer.

I may send out 30 emails, and I will get about 10 responses back, and then 3 of those turn into decent prospects and after a couple weeks of emailing back and forth one will buy the load.

I get them to wire the money to the manufacturer and they pay me my mark up.

Up until a couple of years ago I had done this consistently for a few years.... and have made scores of sales. I once even pulled an urgency tactic and closed a truckload in 24 hours and cleared Almost 8 grand in commission alone, for just a few hours work. Literally I think this guy bought within 3 emails the same day.

Some go like that and others take weeks to nurture, but its all by email and only takes a very little amount of time daily to keep up with.

Hope this helps.

Ps. The conversion is high because Im matching up a guy with 50,000 gallons of excess house paint let say, to a list of 200 people on alibaba from other countries who are BEGGING someone to give them a below wholesale deal on a couple of truckloads of house paint.

It takes a couple of weeks of email negotiations to close a deal usually, sometimes a month even...but its 100% email....most of the customers do not speak good English if ANY. I write them and they probably have translators who read my email back to them in many cases and help negotiate... in any event, most of them prefer internet to phone.

Because of the way the simple system is structured... basically matching a liquidation seller with a person who is looking for a load of that kind of product, makes the conversion is higher than most other cold email.

People on trades sites are SOLICITING you to send them quotes on these loads, whatever kind they are.... They buy thousands of different things. Go check out Alibaba yourself and you will see what I mean.

My only special knowledge here is knowing how to get a manufacturer to give you a good brokering deal. The below manufacturers price , and the demand for the product does the rest...you just email and haggle via email. If you have to come down ten cents its cool because you have that flexibility when acting as a broker who works by marking things up.

I would go back and read some of the 5 star threads with cold call scripts. I know alot of warriors who do offline have had some successes with those.

Not really. All times of year are about the same.

Referrals.
Remember the shampoo commercial, "If you tell two friends and they tell two friends?"
Free advertising with credability.

Hi John,

I may have not communicated clearly, so let me explain.

There are certain services I don't offer because they don't fit with what my consulting skill-set, maybe I don't want to use outsourcing or they just don't fit with what our business does. So those are out as lead generators.

I always select an industry that meets my client profile. Those industries share general/similar problems e.g. figuring out how to make their service more tangible for instance so they overcome engagement or buying issues.

There are numerous ways our company help, but when planning out our objectives and strategy for the upcoming quarter, we first figure out evidence of the problems we're going to focus on and what target market.

We then work on how to take what's working and add as much personalization as possible for each business or how to introduce or add something that delivers a different and valuable service or product.

Selling a Commodity

If you (not you as in John) sell something that the business can get from somewhere else and it's going to be pretty much the same, give and take a few things, then that's a commodity. No differentiation and available elsewhere at pretty much the same price with the end product being pretty much the same, think SEO, Facebook marketing etc.

In my business, we never offer commodities and it's the main reason why we don't use cold calling as a strategy. Local email marketing could be called a commodity but it's how it's perceived that makes the difference - this also dictates our approach to generating leads for the service, either way we would not cold-call to introduce ourselves.

I've said it in the past and would like to repeat it for clarity. The only time we would cold-call using the phone or email is when there's no other way to reach the prospect. That's the only time we would do it.

Remember, when responding to posts about perplexity with cold-calling, I can only mention and offer up things we do in our small business consulting, things we implement for clients and Offline Consultants I've worked with.

If cold-calling works for others then that's what they can talk about too.

Regards and hope that helps.

BAYO

Gotta throw my vote in for LinkedIn (obviously--launched my whole offline business using only LinkedIn).

Referrals are wonderful and super easy to close!