George Flolo, Chair
Marketing & Industry Awareness Committee
The Flolo Corp.
Bensenville (Chicago), Illinois
One important selling principle is to keep your company’s name and your name in front of the customer as often as possible.
The personal sales call is the best selling tool for this purpose. However, it can be time-consuming and expensive, and can lose its effect in a short time without another method of follow up.
Another method to get one’s name out is through the use of flyers/mailers with special offers or announcements of new products or services. Properly positioned, this method does benefit you even without a purchase because your corporate identity is at least seen. Even though this method is a fraction of the cost of a sales call, it still has a significant cost compared to what I call “Enhanced E-mail.”
E-mails of today
As we found in the first “EASA State of the Industry” research, customers are busy and don’t have time to research additional suppliers unless a problem occurs. For example, how many municipalities use you for the motor repair and someone else for the pump work?
In our industry, e-mail tends to be a method of communicating on a specific issue. For example, one might use e-mail to get a sales quote to a customer quickly instead of using snail mail. On a repair, we might send digital pictures by e-mail to better explain a particular failure and condition.
Focused attention
In these circumstances, we tend to overlook that we have the customer’s focused attention in those types of communications. As a comparison, a very large percentage of flyers/mailers won’t even make it past the receptionist desk or are placed in the “circular file.”
“Enhanced e-mail” message
Since the sales quote or repair-related e-mail is probably important to the recipient, it’s an opportunity to very delicately sell another service. However, this e-mail can’t lose its original focus. This “enhancement” can be made in the signature box that you use in your e-mail’s closing. A very subtle statement like “Predictive Maintenance Increases Uptime – One of Our Specialties” is an example. Another might be “Electronic Drive Failure – Same Day Repair Service” or “Reduce your Insurance Costs with a Thermography Survey – Call for a Quote.”
I’m sure most of us can come up with 10 or more short bullet points easily. You might want to change your signature box each Monday morning to reflect a new bullet. By putting it in your signature box, it gets repeated time after time without re-keying the information.
Small effort – big reward
The cost for this subtle “enhancement” is insignificant. With 10 to 13 bullets, each one will only be repeated once every 10 to 13 weeks. This is an easy way to support your field sales efforts, especially when you visit a customer and he or she asks about the service mentioned in your e-mail.
This is simply another vehicle to get your message out without it being junk mail or junk e-mail. One of my inside representatives thought of this and has had a great deal of success. It worked for us and can for you, too.
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