The key to success, therefore, is to maintain control over the various levels of interest and develop a consistent strategy in dealing with each one. You can never lose sight of the fact that you are building trust and educating potential clients about your offering. By maintaining a good tracking system, you can appropriately maintain contact through newsletters or phone calls even while you are busy on other assignments. This eliminates the danger of being "out of sight, out of mind." An organized tracking system also helps you to avoid the "If you market you can't work, and if you work you can't market" dilemma.
Portable executives can handle their tracking in any number of ways, from making notes on Rolodex or index cards to purchasing a computer software package to help keep track of this information. How executives track this information is far less important than making sure that they do it in an organized manner on a consistent basis. The minimum objective is to maintain customer awareness and, hopefully, to expand it.
Focusing on Potential Customers
In developing and sending out your marketing materials, it is essential that you gauge each current or potential client's level of awareness at any given time. Imagine each client as somewhere on a continuum from "unaware of product" to "repeat customer."
In your initial efforts at marketing, you will realize that there is a very broad potential pool of customers to whom you can at tempt to market your services or product. For example, much of the junk mail you receive has been aimed at the broadest possible market for a service or product being offered. You may, for instance, receive marketing materials and advertisements for every conceivable type of computer hardware and software simply because someone put you on a direct mailing list of computer owners. In other instances, the zip code you live in or your income level are the only criteria applied in targeting you as a potential buyer.
However, direct mail strategies must be focused in order to be both cost effective and manageable. In thinking of your potential and current customers, then, it helps to assign them to one of the following categories:
- Aware
- Interested
- First time buyer
- Repeat customer
Awareness
Creating awareness of the product or service is the first step in building a successful marketing program. While s just starting out may not have the budget to blitz the marketplace with fancy mailing pieces, they can be very effective with a small number of hand tailored letters to a well defined audience, with appropriate follow up contacts. A well designed effort that emphasizes the relevance of your product or service should produce a steady flow of interested "live" leads.
The Interested
Handling the interested population is tricky, because when potential buyers reach this level, must respond with a careful blend of marketing and sales strategies in order to convert the interested target into an actual buyer. Handled correctly, response to the interested group can form the foundation for a successful sale.
In approaching potential clients in the interested group, your role is to build a relationship that enables you to tailor or adjust your offering to the clients' needs. Your approach to this group must shift subtly from that of marketing to that of sales, and you should be sensitive to the point in the relationship where this occurs. Although the line between marketing and sales is often blurred, you must continue to educate the customer about the offering even as the sale emerges and you negotiate the specifics of a particular deal. For who wears both hats, this can be difficult, since both processes must work together in order to develop long term customers.
