The Client Letter
July 9, 2012
Sedona, Arizona
Cloudy 93 degrees
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Think your prospects should hire you? If you tell them that, you’re a salesman, if you get THEM to tell YOU that, you’re a smart cookie. Here’s the skill you need.
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“Dear Mr. Client, your email marketing sucks and I really think you should hire me to get it fixed.”
So let’s say you’re a marketing consultant. I can’t imagine saying something like the phrase above in a meeting with a prospective client would do much for your chances of getting hired.
It might be the truth, but it’s stupid if you say it out loud.
So how do you communicate an idea like that and make yourself look good? And position yourself as an expert and not a salesman?
If you’ve been reading this letter for any length of time, you probably already know the answer.
The answer is to ask some questions.
“Mr. Client… I understand that you send 3 or 4 emails to a prospect in an effort to sell them your products and services. Can you walk me through your thought process that helped you arrive at that number? Would you talk about the results you’ve been getting from the mailing sequence as it’s setup now? How do you think it might affect sales to increase the number of touches each prospect gets by say, maybe a factor of 4, 5 or 10? What do you think that might do to the lifetime value of your customers if you applied this same strategy to them?”
Can you see how some simple questions can lead to the prospect coming to his OWN conclusion that his marketing sucks and that he’s leaving a ton of money on the table by not getting it fixed?
Questions are powerful. Questions put you in control. Questions open doors. Questions are about as close as you can get to reading someone’s mind (unless you can actually read someone’s mind 🙂