Zalacsany

It may take up to five years to make a sale. Have a lot of patience and make sure your drip marketing program is for the long term. How did we get noticed by this crazy fox? Checking her history, I saw that our telemarketer had initially called her four times but was never able to track her down. Following those initial calls, our follow-ups were consistently routine. Because she had shown an interest in one of our contact management and CRM applications, we automatically added her name to our monthly e-mail newsletter list. For the next sixty months, Julie received newsletters, invitations to free training on the Internet, and occasional announcements of new product releases and information. Even though we never made contact, she did receive two personal e-mails a year from our company, offering any assistance whenever she needed. She was also included in our twice-yearly postcard mailing too. Poor Julie! All she did was innocently ask for a little information about a software product and for the next five years she was sentenced to a stream of communications from a company she hardly knew.
Occasionally she replied (often in the middle of the night) with a brief “thanks for the info” but for the most part we never heard from her. Not once, however, did she ask to be removed from our list, even though she was given ample opportunity to do so.

Our “drip” marketing program (which I’ll describe in more detail shortly) lured in a wacky ol’ fox. Julie called us out of the blue because she was interested in a contact management and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software application that we sold. She was a fast talker with a hyperactive personality, and she juggled two other phone calls while on the phone with me. She wanted to know every little detail about our product, but she would cut me off in mid-sentence when the information became too much. After I heard a crying baby in the background, she told me that her husband traveled a lot and that her kids often came to the office with her. She said that she didn’t like surprises, but she admitted she never fully knew what was going on in her business from one moment to the next. She had so many things on her mind that she would ask a question only to later forget it. Now this was a crazy fox!
Julie had contacted us five years earlier when she was starting up a small business that specialized in floral arrangements for special events like weddings. She was curious about contact management, but that was all. Five years later, she employed twenty-five people and was doing business in six states! Her workdays were now twelve hours long, and her desk was complete chaos. She had been surviving on a little custom-created database, but now she needed to get a true customer relationship and contact management application for her entire company. Oh, and she also mentioned that her custom database had become corrupted and she had a major mailing to do the following week. She was completely manic on the phone, and she needed help.
When Julie had finally made the decision that it was time to buy, our name came first into her mind. She called us as a customer eager to purchase—mostly because she had a problem. “I kept getting your c-mails and your postcards and your mailings and I saved many of them,” she later told me. “I knew at some point I would need a system like this and you stayed on my radar.”