Think of your ideal sales prospect. What about them would make them far more likely to buy from you?
Would it help if they already knew you..liked you..trusted you? Wouldn’t that make the sales process faster?
What if you knew..before you even called them…that they qualified financially for what you sold? What if you knew ahead of time that they would take your call, and almost certainly see you?
Doesn’t that sound great? Now, let’s make it even better..
They have already formed the habit of buying what you sell. They have already proven that they will buy from someone that sells in the same way that you sell. They are someone that is used to giving you money, and has made that a habit. Someone you actually expect to buy from you.…even before you call them.
Of course, these are your customers.
In the video above I told a story of one method I used to sell my previous buyers. But there is more. If you contact your previous buyers, you’ll son discover that t hey tend to buy…what you sell…at pretty regular intervals. For example, I sold high end expensive vacuum cleaners. After I started calling my old customers, I found that they tended to buy a new high end expensive vacuum cleaner about every 6-8 years. One of the surprising ways I found that out was to call them (or just drop by) after ten years…only to discover that they had already bought another high end vacuum cleaner…from somebody else. So eventually, I just started contacting my customers every few years, knowing that it was likely that they wold buy from me again…after only a couple of contacts. Highly profitable. And of course it also provided good customer service.
But here is what I found even more profitable…contacting customers of other companies that also sold a different brand of the item I sold. In other words, just a different high end vacuum cleaner.
I would simply buy the list of customers from another distributor, who didn’t want the customer service hassles. I would also buy their customer list if they were going out of business. I normally paid a dollar a name. Some of these names were bad though, either they moved away, died, or had already just bought from somebody else. I also found out that names of customers that were more than 10 years old…were much less valuable, and I stopped calling them.
The advantage of calling other vacuum cleaner brand’s lists is what what I sold was completely different. It’s easier to sell something different than the same thing. Now they just had one more reason to buy. It was also easier to sell the people that complained about what they bought..as long as I sold a different brand. When I sold a newer model of the same brand, I would have to re-sell them on why they bought in the first place, and then he advantages of the new model.
Later, when selling local online marketing services to retailers and service business owners….I immediately used the same principle. I sought out business owners that were already spending money on print advertising…and had already paid someone to create a website for them. These people were proven buyers of the kind of service I sold.
I cover a little of this kind of prospecting in my book Sales Prospecting: The Ultimate Guide To Referral Selling, Social Contact Marketing, Telephone Prospecting, And Cold Calling To Find Highly Likely Prospects You Can Close In One Call
