A Simple Strategy To Land Your Very Best Buyers
“In a world full of blue fish swimming right, I am the green fish swimming left.”
Unknown
When someone starts a new business, they usually first think of success in terms of numbers - for example, if we can just reach $X dollars in sales, we'll be in great shape. At this early points it doesn’t matter so much where the money comes from, just as long as it comes.
Then, as time goes on and the new business hopefully reaches and exceeds their initial sales targets, they invariably learn some difficult lessons along the way - such as “not all customers are created equal.” By that I mean, some are a pleasure to work with, while others age you a decade and give no end of trouble . So the company realigns itself to be a bit more discerning - hopefully having the cashflow (and the marketing engine in place) to confidently say no to any new business that exhibits red flags.
Time marches on and now, being more selective about the kinds of customers it chooses to work with the business hopefully gets savvier still, because it starts identifying profitability patterns among its own customer base. Some customers are infinitely more profitable than others, it discovers, while others somewhat surprisingly, are not.
So the company evolves again and narrows its focus further to try and better target these kinds of nice to work with customers who’ll buy goods and services with bigger margins . And time ticks on …
This overly simplistic example is a somewhat typical evolution of many businesses approach to marketing and sales. Try, learn (sometimes the hard way), pivot, try again, learn … and so on. If you’ve read my new book The Client Stampede, you’ll know that this method of building your business is not only painfully slow, but incredibly expensive because of all the lost time and opportunity.
The faster, more profitable way is to leap ahead by identifying your 100 Dream List.
What is a 100 Dream List?
This is a list of your dream clients or represent a neighborhood or target market of your very best buyers. Dream clients or best buyers are the people or businesses who will buy your product or service faster, in greater quantities and more frequently than other buyers.
Landing just a handful of these dream clients can have a seismic shift on your bottom line.
Identifying and marketing to a 100 Dream List is one of my favorite growth strategies for any business - small, mid-sized and super-sized. Here's how it works:
Identifying The Most Lucrative “Who”
Being able to identify your Dream 100 is the step that requires the most thought. Who would be the best buyers for your goods and services? Are they VPs of large companies, social media influencers, super-networkers, fast-growing companies in your target industries, or maybe all? What would it mean for your company if say 5 of these companies became your customers? If you own a real estate brokerage, maybe these are wealthy families in the area, or large property developers. If you own a wealth management company, maybe your Dream 100 would include the names of several very high profile people with large networks, as well as key super-influencers at the local Chamber of Commerce, or the CEOs of large professional organizations etc.
Here’s more important detail: Does your Dream 100 consist of actual buyers and not just company names? Your Dream 100 has to have the names of actual buyers who have the authority to say yes to you. Using one of the paid premium services on LinkedIN is a great resource for doing this kind of super-sleuthing. Another tip is to ask your existing customers who their colleagues are at specific target organizations. Industries are surprisingly small and you may already have a lot of the information, without realizing it, at your fingertips.
2. Now it's time to come up with an irresistible offer - but not a sales pitch.
This is the step most companies get wrong because their sales people go straight into selling mode at every possible opportunity. Don't do this.
The first step is to send out an offer letter offering something of real value to your Dream 100. What qualifies as real value? It’s something ideally they would pay to have, but don’t have to because you’re offering it to them, no strings attached.
I'll give you a specific example. One of our clients is a tech company that provides highly specialized supply chain tracking and inventory management systems to manufacturing companies. We identified their Dream 100 list that included some of the biggest names in manufacturing and sent an offer letter to their CEOs to share the five most dangerous trends facing their industry.
But we didn't offer them a report we'd written ourselves. Instead we commissioned an independent study and offered to share the results at no cost to them. Now as the CEO of a manufacturing company, that's a pretty difficult offer to resist provided the study is conducted by a reputable company (which ours was). In sending this offer letter, definitely don’t email it. It needs to go snail mail, via UPS or Fedex to guarantee that it will actually get delivered and that it won’t be thrown into the trash, unopened on arrival.
For your initial offer letter you can expect a 1-4% response rate. Remember that this is a response from your DREAM buyers. Once they have responded, then all follow up should be either via phone or direct mail unless they have personally emailed you. Don’t try and shift things into a digital space for the simple reason that that’s what everyone else does. We all get far too many emails. Make the connection as real and in-person where possible.
And for those who don't respond to the first mailing, they get a second mailing - a few weeks later that makes the same offer, but packaged differently and in a way that is also irresistible to open.
Three weeks later we sent a follow-up package to those who ignored the first letter that included a pocket sized flashlight with a letter titled "Don't be left in the dark - discover the 5 most dangeous trends facing the manufacturing industry today (as reported by an independent study).”
Repeat in three weeks to everyone who didn’t respond with the same offer packaged again irresistibly (and creatively).
This Dream 100 mailing sequence now forms part of your Marketing Engine - your system that enables you to methodically reach out to your Dream 100. But guess what - none of the marketing components or mailings for your Dream 100 should include any kind of digital marketing. NONE. No emails, no banner ads, no digital flyers or advertising of any kind.
If you want your message to truly stand out then you have to do what your competitors are not prepared to do and approach people old-school-style - via a medium that requires careful strategic thought, planning and a minimal level of investment . That’s the key reason why Direct Mail still pulls the highest response rates of any advertising media - substantially higher than digital (which is one of the reasons that Google still mails me postcards and direct mail campaigns as an ad agency owner). It takes very little effort to press send on an email, or even throw something up and run it as an ad. But it takes considerably more thought, strategy and cost to have a package fedexed in the mail, which is why you save it for your highest value prospects.
This marketing strategy works. If a package arrived on your desk that obviously contained something "lumpy" inside and was marked private and confidential, could you resist opening it? Getting your message read is half the battle! Our initial campaign got a 8% response rate, and every time a follow up letter went out, we averaged an additional 3% response rate. The end result was that within 4 months our clients' sales team had secured meetings with 38% of their Dream 100…
Reaching your Dream 100 is going to be a lesson in persistence.
Most people give up after trying one or two tries. Keep sending follow-up direct mail packages that keep adding value and are fun to receive. It would only take landing one Dream 100 client to change your business forever. Don’t give up!
