A recent visit to a new PODi member shed light on an interesting way to get warm sales leads. The $5mil commercial printing company is branching out from commercial printing and fulfillment services into marketing services using 1 to 1 marketing and digital printing. After profiling their target market and target prospects they then look for ways to get an appointment based on a referral.
Naturally they were pursuing existing relationships with clients and exhibiting at local events. However, one particularly clever idea they were pursuing is to find mutual business relationships among their firm and their prospect’s firm and leverage them into referrals. Turns out by using online business databases one can determine the bank and accounting firm a prospect uses. Then by taking the set that matches to their banker and accounting firm he can get high level referrals into this subset of prospect accounts.
By leveraging mutual relationships they were able to get referrals to new prospects, save time and jump start their sales process.
For referrals and cold calls Caslon has developed a tool for helping you build your own message to new prospects. The Caslon tool contains sample scripts and hooks for a number of vertical industries and can easily be modified for referrals. Modifications for email and voice mail scripts are also provided. The tool is available free to PODi members as part of the S3 Council.
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