The third rule of direct mail is to take action. It is unlikely the prospect will take action and call you, which is one of the reasons why the industry average response to direct mail is so low. So you should take the responsibility for taking the action. You do that by calling the prospect. If it is a residential prospect, make sure you have checked the do-not-call list before calling. There are services that scrub phone lists to illuminate those customers on the do-not-call list. By using that kind of service, you can prevent making calls that could result in a fine.
You can, however, make phone calls to any commercial business without fear of violating a do-not-call list.
The reason you cannot rely on the prospect taking action and calling you is simple. They live in the same nation as you and I. It happens to be the largest nation in the world: Procrastination. We all procrastinate. We all hear advertisements on TV or the radio or read them in the newspaper and do nothing about them, even when we are interested. We plan to do it some other time, later on, when we get around to it, and nothing happens.
That takes care of the first fifteen of the 15+15+15 rule: send fifteen pieces of mail to targeted prospects every day.
Before I go on, you may be wondering why I suggested you limit the number of direct mail pieces sent to fifteen. I did so for two reasons. First, fifteen pieces of direct mail takes just a few minutes every morning to prepare and get ready to mail. Any salesperson can easily find the time to do this without disrupting the rest of her day. Second, fifteen pieces of mail is easier to follow up on. If I send too many pieces, I’m less likely to take step two, which is to call the prospects I mailed.
The mail you sent serves as a warm-up to what would otherwise be a cold call. You are now making a warm call. The letter you sent also gives you a reason for calling: to follow up on the mail you sent. You should call the prospect approximately three days after you send a piece of mail. Not just after the third piece—every time.
Next, you should expect an objection when you call. Don’t be so naïve as to believe the prospect will be happy to hear from you. Occasionally that’s true, but more often than not you’ll hear this most typical of objections, the objection we all must have been taught in our mother’s wombs to say to salespeople when they call or even approach us: “I am not interested.”
I’m not surprised when I hear this objection, and neither should you. I am prepared for it. Learn to say this in response.
Salesperson: “When you say you’re not interested, are you saying you are not interested in buying anything?”
Prospect: “Exactly. I’m not interested in buying anything.”
Salesperson: “Great, because I’m not interested in selling you anything. In fact, I can make you two promises. First, the information I will share with you and your family when we get together will prove valuable to you and your family. And second, I won’t demonstrate anything or attempt to sell you anything unless you ask me to do so. And, of course, if you’re not interested in buying, you won’t ask. That’s fair, isn’t it? So when can we get together? Would tonight at 6 be good or is 7:30 better?” (Note the choice between two yeses.)
If you do this, you’ll get appointments. Not all of the time, but enough to make it well worth the time you invested.
When making appointments by phone, be clear about your goals. If your goal is to make an appointment, then sell the appointment and don’t try to sell your product on the phone. There are some products that can be sold on the phone, and that’s a decision you have to make prior to making phone calls. If the system you sell requires demonstration, a survey, time to build value, or face-to-face contact, do not under any circumstances attempt to sell the product on the phone. Your goal is to sell an appointment on the phone, and then sell the product when you get in front of the prospect.
The third fifteen of the 15+15+15 rule is to shake fifteen hands a day. Obviously I don’t mean shaking just anyone’s hand; the fifteen hands you might shake could be the fifteen people you sent mail to and then called three or four days ago. The goal is to see fifteen prospects every single day, belly-to-belly.
Cold-Calling
Cold-calling is by far the fastest and easiest way to make sales today. “Warm-calling,” following up on mail that you have sent, puts your destiny squarely in your hands, not in the hands of the mail carrier, the phone company, or procrastinating prospects. You’re in charge. In fact, warm calls give the procrastinating prospect the opportunity to get out of the land of procrastination, to take action instead of putting off decisions. When you knock on doors, you’ll find a person who has been meaning to get around to calling you or someone else that sells what you sell, a person who has wanted to buy but hasn’t. All you have to do is develop a script (what to say) and then get off your seat and out on the street. A customer is waiting for you if you’ll just knock.
Flyers
Flyers can be an inexpensive and effective way to target exactly the prospect you believe, or statistics suggest buys your product. I have used flyers to warm up an area I planned to cold-call. That way the prospect isn’t entirely surprised to see me at their door or place of business.
However, like direct mail, only a small percentage of the flyers you hang will actually be read. Some people simply crumble the flyer up and toss it in the trash without paying close attention to what it says or offers. So you have to be creative. Search for designs that are more appealing to your target audience.
I’ve seen flyers that were printed on a heavier card stock paper and were die-cut to fit around the doorknob. That type of flyer is easier to read and appears more important, which brings me to content. As in direct mail, the message on the flyer should be short, easy to read, and attention grabbing. If you have designed a direct mail program that proved more effective than industry statistics suggest, use some of what you said in the direct mail piece on the flyer. In fact, why not combine a flyer program with a direct mail program, assuming you are targeting an area in town?
What I’m going to tell you now, you will find hard to believe. But it worked. We were developing a door-to-door program for a Fortune 50 company. The plan included driving teams of salespeople to a targeted area to knock doors. If someone was home they gave their door presentation in hopes of being invited in. Once in, the closing rate was upwards of 75 percent. The question was what to do when no one was home.
We had two clear choices: move on to the next door and hope we’d catch the people at home on a return visit to the neighborhood, or leave something behind to indicate we were there and hope we’d get a call from the homeowner asking us to come back. It seemed like a waste of energy to leave without leaving something behind, taking even a remote shot at making a sale, so we decided to develop a flyer to leave at the door.
The early choice, considering we were a big company with lots of resources, was to have marketing design a classy door hanger/flyer complete with great artwork, pictures, and professionally written copy in multicolor, all designed to grab attention and promote a response. The resulting door hanger was very nice—even potentially award-winning if we had entered it in a marketing contest—but it didn’t work.
We tracked the number of door hangers we left behind and the response to them, and the results were no better than direct mail: roughly half of 1 percent. And considering that we weren’t knocking on thousands of doors, the percentage return wasn’t worth the investment. So we continued to try other options.
Then one of our trainers stumbled on a method that worked. The trainer was at one of our independent dealers’ locations conducting a training that featured door-knocking as a primary sales method. We had instructed the dealer to order the die-cut door hangers and have them onsite in time for the training. However, when the trainer arrived, the door hangers were not there.
Considering