You've Got Mail

You need a medium that is immediate, personal, trackable and talks with those who are anxious to hear from you. That medium is email marketing. It is the strongest and fastest growing marketing tool available today. Big companies are moving money away from TV, print and radio and moving it into email campaigns. Why? Because it works. Consider this:

• 82% of email users have purchased a product because of an email offer.



• US online agency Doubleclick predicts a rise of 17% in email marketing budgets in the US. TV, print and radio and predicted to decrease.



• Microsoft sends out more than 20 million email marketing pieces every month.

Permission based email marketing campaigns can provide marketers with reports on their markets they only dreamed of before. This allows them to cut down on wastage and niche more meaningful offers with the obvious benefit of better returns for effort and investment.

A Price Waterhouse Coopers survey found 83 percent of Internet users felt email was their primary reason for using the Internet. Given the choice, an overwhelming majority turned down books, radios, and televisions in favor of an Internet connection with email on a desert island.

Ask a different research company and you will get a different answer for the average response rate of opt-in email campaigns. Jupiter Communications will tell you 5 to 15 percent. Forrester will tell you 14 to 22 percent. Ask a different email marketer and get a different answer. Some are getting only 3 percent and some are getting 40 percent. But they all agree on three things: It's not very expensive, it's not very hard, and it's got a better return on investment than other marketing and advertising techniques.

Quit trying to win a new game with old weapons. Build an email list, watch it grow even bigger, use it to share useful information and watch your profits grow.

Finally an advertising form that tells you what your customers think of you and what’s important to them. You have to do this.

MaSM Now Offers Powerful Email Marketing Programs

MaSM, The Marketing and Sales Management Group has partnered with the world leader in email marketing, Constant Contact, to provide its customers with full service email programs.

MaSM is a sales appointment setting, consulting firm that focuses on direct response marketing. Constant Contact is the world leader in email marketing programs that not only help attract new customers, but build long-term profitable relationships with existing clients.

In making the announcement, MaSM COO, Elizabeth Duggan said, “Email marketing makes perfect sense. It is the most direct way to reach customers in a timely manner. The tools we now offer build sales volume and long term client relationships. Email marketing is immediate, inexpensive, trackable and much more effective than other strategies.”

MaSM staff can develop full email marketing campaigns to include: e-newsletters, product announcements, surveys, brand building, loyalty programs and direct response sales.

Don't Listen To Others

Quit Cold Calling

If you can’t cold call, don’t! It’s that easy.

How, you now ask, can you get qualified prospects on whom to call and turn into your new customers if you don’t cold call? Let someone else do it.

The typical sales type will do anything to avoid dialing the phone to try to convince someone they don’t know to meet and listen to their pitch. It is uncomfortable bordering on painful.

Watch your sales pro during “phone time”. He will rearrange papers on his desk, take extended restroom breaks, work feverishly on an email, chart or other paperwork, dial and hang-up quickly claiming to get a busy signal, doodle, stare into space, take calls from customers he must service, get extra coffee, meet with other staffers who need his attention right now and on and on it goes. A sales rep will do almost anything to avoid the dreaded cold call.

The downside, of course, is very few calls get made, no new rocks are overturned and the sales pipeline remains empty. Sales projections are missed, money is lost and unhappiness reigns supreme.

Turn this highly important task over to a phone sales professional and watch your fortunes rise. A sales appointment setter or telemarketer will dial the phone 30 to 50 times an hour and talk with a fair number of qualified prospects, scheduling appointments and gathering important competitor information. This prospector goes about the job cheerfully, never losing sight of the goal of setting meetings with qualified potential customers. He is a craftsman—an artisan who never gives up.

Using these phone pros builds your business by canvassing targeted SIC codes, demographics or geographic locations. More meetings are scheduled, more presentations made and many more sales closed.

Quit fighting the obvious. If you can’t cold call, DON’T.

Doing The Job For Free

Making the decision to use sales appointment setters isn’t really so hard. If you consider all of the facts, the choice is simple really. Separating sales appointment setting from the actual sales process is plain and simple, smart. It fills anemic pipelines, evens out revenue droughts, provides meaningful reporting, improves morale, greatly reduces oversight, helps you make more money and it can be done free.

The word free has lost its meaning over the years. Free means something with a lot of strings attached that may really cost more than if you would buy the item outright. To be fair, in the case of sales appointment setting, the better term might be zero net cost rather than free.

Imagine your company has a staff of three outside sales reps. (Good salespeople all but lacking the time or desire to prospect and cold call. It isn’t unusual. In fact, there is nary a company exec who doesn’t echo that very complaint on a daily basis.) You make the decision to employ a sales appointment setting firm to schedule sales meetings. The hook is, the sales reps will pay for the service—pay for their new appointments.

Management usually gasps at this suggestion saying the sales reps will refuse, complain profanely, quit and take their book of business to a competitor. Yes, they will complain loud and long. No, they won’t quit. As the program is explained, they will understand that this makes their job easier and in fact, helps them make more money—money that dwarfs what they will pay for an appointment setter.

The typical sales rep spends 80% of his day servicing, schmoozing, following up and involving himself in non-sales activities. It leaves precious little time to prospect and cold call to find new clients. Before long it cuts into his earnings and the company profits forcing him into frenetic activity to try to make quota and maintain the lifestyle to which he has become accustomed. Frenetic sales activity is a poor substitute for the orderly sales process prospects demand.

The sales appointment setting firm, statistically, will improve selling activity by 30% on average. It provides a regular, steady stream of prospects on whom to call. Moreover the appointment-setter becomes an inside sales rep helping his outside counterpart sell more by providing, in addition to appointments, leads, requests for information and valuable insights about competitors. He becomes the keeper of the calendar, the follow-up man, and the cheerleader. Before long your sales rep is happier, much more productive and there is little need for sales management.

Free appointment setting or zero net cost appointment setting. You pick the term but know that it will change the face of your sales organization in the most positive way ever. You may even rethink your take on the word free.