My business produces one off unique bespoke garments for brides, burlesque artists and historical costumers with healthy disposable income. I have received 120 potential leads from a regional bridal magazine including email, post addresses and telephone numbers. I'm not a confident sales person and don't want to mess up this golden opportunity. My personal experience of sales calls is not positive because I tend to seek out products when I want them. So what's the best way to get passed people with my attitude and convince them to check out my business?
Do those prospects come from an opt-in process?
Are they aware that your brand obtained their data?
If not, than you are cold-calling them and no matter who it is, we humans do not like to receive cold-calls, right.
Though, you are in a premium market, thus you are in the market to put in a lot of effort to warm them up or to get in front of your leads.
In your case, you already have their names and mail addresses. I'd get those mail addresses into gmail and use discoverly to receive their social media accounts.
Discoverly is a chrome plugin that will automatically retrieve the mail addresses linked social media accounts, if there are some. http://discover.ly/
Armed with those you can do further research and look if they have shared interest or even know eachother with followerwonk.com or buzzsumo.com.
You can use this data to prioritize your list as you already have a positive WOM signal if they know each other and only one becomes your customer. I'd advise to create a spreadsheet to keep track of your research.
I'd consider to think about an outreach method with your facebook channel as your prospects can immediately associate your account with your business giving you higher trust-value than a faceless cold-call and especially if they can see your work without any friction and low mental effort - just a click away.
You may even gain insights to their actual consumption patterns, e.g. you might see someone publishing an event that is related to your business and they are going to - thus you could approach them on spot.
You could also gain additional insights about lead quality with realizing at what stage of their "marriage preparation" they are. With this you can at least weed out the non-qualified leads, those that are just "interested" but far from making an elaborate purchasing decision.
There is so much you could do with that data,but even if all of these seem out of your willingness,take this advice cold-mailing > cold-calls.
Hope that helped a bit ;)
-Andi
The simple answer is that you need to do what you do best and turn the marketing over to a marketing and sales professional. Maybe not what you want to hear, but you need a lion when it comes to marketing. Someone who has marketing running through their veins.
Mike
From the Trenches to the Towers Marketing
I will be glad to help as my time permits.
Make no sales pitch. Introduce yourself to prospective customers. Explain that you'd like to work with people like them in the future, and ask them if they have time to check out images of your designs and provide any feedback – perhaps through a short online survey.
As a small token of appreciation, you can give out a $5 gift card for Starbucks (or something similar) to those who spend a few minutes of their day looking at your website. Based on 120 leads, that expense would be no more than $600 – and probably less, since not everyone would respond to the survey invitation.
The survey itself isn't the goal. The goal is to convince people to spend time familiarizing themselves with your services. And the gift card functions as a good-will "ambassador" and a reminder.
This approach is far less confrontational than typical cold calling. People are more likely to respond favorably, even if they don't participate in the survey. Without being asked to purchase anything from you, they may spontaneously ask about hiring you or recommend you to acquaintances. After all, they'd be checking out your designs in a zero-pressure situation ... much as we might voluntarily wander into a store. Once inside, we often buy if we like what we see.
P.S. If you're not 100% confident in your ability to seduce customers with written copy, I can assist with that. Presumably, you've already selected a brand name and procured the domain for your website. Sometimes the domain is merely a place holder. If you're dissatisfied at all with what you picked, then I'd suggest upgrading prior to reaching out to customers. Put your best foot forward!
