November 13, 2009
While someone might suggest that leafleting, technically, is similar to cold calling, I will argue that it is not. With a leaflet you are in control, what to say (include) and leave the other one to make up his mind, in his own time whether they want your services/ products or not. Cold calling is aggressive, interrupts your day and mostly proves to be counter-productive. For more info on cold-calling, read this Freer e-book Frank J. Rumbauskas, NevercoldCall.
1. Cold calling destroys your status as a business equal.
2. Nobody likes having their day interrupted by a sales pitch no matter how good or well delivered it is.
3. It is invasive and disruptive
4. People do not like to be sold to
5. It’s limited to the number of people you can reach through only one or two mediums
6. It is a whole lot easier in the information age to find buyers rather than sell to people
7. The conversion and drop out rate for cold call generated appointments is several times higher than getting buyers to come to you
8. You can sell without cold calling and cut out 90% of the time you would spend in situations that will not buy.
9. Spending time in situations that will not buy is the number one reason sales people and new businesses fail
10. I could easily go on.
Buying and self marketing. It’s a difficult one to understand at first, but essentially “buying”, as Frank suggests, is the act of willingly purchasing something that someone needs – whereas “selling” is attempting to convince someone to purchase something whether they need it or not.
Self marketing, as Frank discusses, is about leverage and about scaled down, low-cost, marketing efforts to help promote and market you and your business. These include:
• Use flyers and use a flyer distribution company to make it automatic
• Use email instead of phone, and use auto-responders to make responses automatic. Use video email to get a better response.
• Use direct mail, and sales letters to a prospecting list then follow up via telephone or email.
• Build a website or a blog and keep it up to date and make it easy to understand your products, services, benefits and contact you.
• Use a free newsletter and send prospects free, valuable information.
• Become an authorized expert by writing articles and posting them on your blog, sending them into a newspaper/magazine.
• Write your own PR pieces, or hire a PR consultant and put them on a retainer.
• Conduct your own seminars, and make them free. If you’re seen as an authorized expert you could charge for the exclusive content.
• Employing trust-based selling to become truly consultative and not another sales rep.
• Networking. Join business networking clubs, forums, etc and get yourself seen.
• Follow up and make your appointments• Make your sales
• Keep your customers/clients happy.
Leafleting if done properly, in a clever, peaceful and reliable way, is cheaper, brings more results and leaves people that “breathing space” that they need to think-and-take-a-decision in their own time; something that not every marketer or salesperson understands clearly. Leafleting or cold calling? You decide.
Now the costs.
*If you engage a call calling team, the costs are considerably more than calling on a leaflet delivery team.
* delivering 10.000 leaflets takes 2-3 days, making 10.000 phone calls can take weeks/ months.
* to produce a leaflet costs 2-3 pence, to deliver it around 4-5, a phone call costs more than 6-7 pence and in most cases considerably more for mobiles.
* once the clients puts the phone down on you, he will forget you, even if s/he needs your products, but a leaflet/ flyer will be there on his table as a reminder.
Reasons are plenty, its you that decides what to do and what method to employ, we suggest Leaflet Distribution anytime over cold calling; not as its our bread & butter, but because one of main reason many new businesses fail is persistent cold calling and bad sales techniques. Go for Leaflet Distribution. By Fast Letterbox Masters of Local Advertising
I found this info very useful. Also the one Why Should You leaflet. Thank you and good luck to you.
But the suggestion of using a how or, a why in a bullet point is indeed valuable.This is a way will create inquisitiveness and people will identify it with some of their problems thus inducing them to read on or, explore further.