Photo credit: sjdunphy / CC BY-SA 2.0
What can professional services providers learn from a small, seven-person document and data storage company?
Quite a bit, as it turns out, including just how important it is to go back to the basics and integrate your marketing and sales tactics—and how to pour a proper pint of Guinness (but we’ll get to that later).
RainToday spoke to Michael Sullivan, president of Automated Records Centre, to find out how the company grew its sales as a direct result of an integrated marketing and sales approach. As a result of the effort, the company saw a 14.4% bump in sales, with more than 54% of campaign-related sales calls closing for an additional six-figures in revenue. Pretty impressive.
The company had tried a variety of marketing tactics over their 10 years of operation, but with modest success. Says Sullivan, “Ultimately, what we found was that we had a lot of tactics out there, but they were really all working independently of one another. We realized we really didn’t have a strategy and needed to revamp what we were doing.”
In order to create a strategic, coordinated marketing and sales effort, Sullivan decided to focus on the basics by asking three questions:
- What is our message?
- To whom do we want to deliver that message?
- How are we going to deliver it?
Think Small
Rather than just going for the biggest pool of possible prospects—mailing to 1,000 or more members of local chambers of commerce had not been working well—Sullivan took a more targeted approach.
His goal was to establish relationships with prospects over time, so he picked the top 100 companies he wanted in his customer mix. Over his decade in the business, he knew the types of companies that needed his services typically had copious records to store, image, and destroy, so the best prospects had been in business for 10 or more years.
In addition, businesses that generate a great deal of paperwork, especially of a sensitive nature—e.g. law offices, insurance firms, healthcare providers, professional services, and larger companies in the manufacturing sector—were his best prospects. And the bigger the company, the more they needed what Automated Records has to offer.
Create an Engaging Program
After drawing a tight circle around the target market, the company evaluated all those tactics they had used in the past (and a few new ones), selected the ones that seemed to work best, and wove them together to create an engaging lead generation and nurturing program.
By integrating direct mail, phone follow-up, and a newsletter, the company saw its business development success rate—defined by secured meetings or sales—jump to a whopping 26%. [To learn the details of the company's approach, read the complete RainToday case study, The Benefit of Integrated Marketing: How One Company Boosted Its Business Development Success Rate By 26%.]
Additional Insights from the Automated Records Centre Case Study:
- Shotgun approaches to marketing aren’t effective, as Sullivan found out. No matter how many marketing activities you undertake, they will be more effective if you structure them to work together. “That seems obvious, but it’s easy to do one thing, then another, then another and then realize that you don’t have a strategy behind all of them,” Sullivan says.
- Salespeople need support. “I hear so many people say, ‘My salesperson just isn’t producing.’ You have to have marketing efforts that support your salespeople,” says Sullivan. He says that even the best salesperson can’t pick up the phone and schedule a meeting without some kind of support system. By aligning Automated Records’ marketing with the goals of the salesperson, and being sensitive to the long sales cycle of his service, Sullivan says he and his salespeople are happier.
- Keep in touch. The first “no” is just a speed bump. By creating the newsletter and focusing on developing useful content for readers, Sullivan has a perfect vehicle to keep in touch with prospects in an unobtrusive way. He says it’s critical to have some kind of vehicle—newsletter, ezine, or periodic mailings—that customers want to receive, then follow up with them by phone to gauge whether their needs have changed. The key to success is to be fun, engaging, or useful—or all of those things, if you can manage it. If you’re boring, people won’t read your material, and the efforts will be wasted, he says.
Oh, and that final bit of learning, how to pour a proper pint? Here it is, courtesy of Michael Sullivan. Sláinte. (That’s Gaelic for to your health!)
