Different sales teams have different ways of prospecting for new business. Everyone tries to be creative, to think of the thing that hasn’t been thought of yet. The different types of email subjects like “don’t forget”, “don’t be left out”, “this is not a sales pitch”, “your boss told me to contact you” and now even the fake emails that look like they come FROM your boss directing you to do things they would never, under normal circumstances, ask you to do. Unbelievable. Then there are the incessant phone calls, all from different numbers. Nothing annoys me more than voicemail at this point. Text messages, snail-mail, and of course the always dreaded “I was in the neighborhood” unannounced in-person visit.
I get it. I’m not in sales, but I realize that you have to do what you have to do to keep up your closing ratio. However, I am in data and I have spent several years working with salespeople. Media salespeople – many great ones. And something we have learned together in this unique and fun opportunity to prospect that combines both of our skill sets and truly aims to benefit the client in a pure and data-driven way.
Running this exercise might even point out some other things in your sales process that you may want to perfect moving forward, so please keep an open mind.
Gather a list of clients who have stopped advertising with you (for whatever reason, doesn’t matter why) over the past 6, 9, or 12 months. Ideally, we are looking for clients who were employing digital advertising tactics through your resources. I’m positive that your research/data/analytics team was set up with read-only access to these clients’ analytics accounts, right? (see, this is where you may want to take note of why gaining this access can really pay off, even after the client’s campaigns have lapsed). Ask your analytics team to take a look at basic traffic performance to these clients’ websites during their campaigns that were running with your company versus after they stopped. There will likely be some very obvious and important gems of information that bubble to the top. They are likely to even find some not-so-basic bits of insight that will be useful in the next step of this process.
Work with your analysts to organize a few key points showing positive ROI of the campaigns they were running with you versus when they stopped. Being able to identify the drop off of traffic and conversions post-campaign nurturing with you and your organization should not only be enough to get the conversation re-started with these businesses that you already have a relationship with, but will indicate your level of concern and care for their well-being and continued future success. Even if the campaigns weren’t the raging success everyone had hoped they would be, let the client know that you’ve been thinking about how you could do better for them and what tweaks you’ve been able to test since that you are confident will perform differently. Nothing is guaranteed in digital marketing, but practice and experience surely create opportunities for improvement.
Don’t just tell them how much you care, use the data and show them. The devil is in the details. Show them the details and show them you care.
