The date was Jan. 14, 2009. It is a date I will never forget — the day when the marketing energy I had been expending for the past six months began to cause business prospects to gravitate toward me in numbers I hadn’t seen in eight years in business.
Over the span of three hours that afternoon, my phone rang with three potential business opportunities from sources with whom I had never spoken. One came as a direct referral from a business colleague whom I had not spoken to in eight months. Another, the owner of a regional insurance agency, came through my Web site “contact us” page after reading an article I had published in a local business journal. The third came from someone who called after becoming familiar with me through my efforts serving on the board of directors of a regional professional association.
This avalanche of inquiry continued over the next two weeks with three more opportunities from similar, but unrelated, sources.
One was a colleague referral, one was through my Web site from a direct Internet search, and a third was from someone who had recently attended one of my strategic alliance partner workshops.
All of these new business opportunities had one thing in common: They were incoming calls that came with absolutely no immediate effort on my part. The trend continued as the month of February brought me seven more prospects.
This was all thanks to a concept called marketing gravity, which pulls prospects toward you and your business just as an apple that falls from a tree is pulled toward the ground.
I first heard of this concept when I started working with my business coach about three years ago.
Few adults, except high school physics teachers, spend much time thinking about the amount of energy the universe expends to make the gravitational force that keeps our feet firmly planted on the ground. But it is useful for us to appreciate the tremendous amount of energy necessary to keep our universe in sync. Likewise, it initially takes a tremendous amount of energy to begin creating marketing gravity so that you can actually reduce direct solicitation efforts while bringing in a significantly higher quality of business opportunities.
But the effort is worth it. In what most believe to be the worst economic conditions in at least a generation, if not a century, I have had more high-quality business opportunities come to me than I had in my first eight years combined. This is because of my marketing gravity strategy and efforts over the last six to eight months.
You can create your own marketing gravity system in these six steps:
- Create a marketing gravity pie. Take a blank piece of paper and draw a circle. Divide the circle into a minimum of eight slices, just like a pizza.
- Identify marketing gravity opportunities. In each of the eight slices, write down one marketing effort/source of business you regularly use.
- Strategize by applying the 80-20 rule. Identify two of the eight sources you wrote in your pie slices that have historically been your best sources of high-quality prospects.
Increase your efforts in those two areas, while beginning to gradually increase your efforts in the two next-best sources.
- Track and measure results. Make adjustments.
- Create a marketing gravity reservoir. As your efforts begin attracting prospects, create a database of contacts. You should accumulate as much information regarding your contacts as possible. At a minimum you should get basic contact information; details about their business, policy anniversary dates, and lifestyle; and birthdays.
- Create a marketing gravity drip marketing funnel. Unlike the drip marketing campaigns of the past that were based only on solicitations, these should be value-based.
By that, I mean sending articles that connect to your prospect’s needs, desires, and personal affinities; birthday card and greetings; and other forms of follow-up communication. By staying in regular contact over time, and without trying to sell anything but while still providing value, the next time you call, they will be more likely to take your call.
This process will allow you to build trusting, value-based relationships, making it easier to communicate with prospects and ask for their business and referrals at strategically appropriate times.
Not everyone will become a client, which is why it is called a funnel. A funnel has a large opening at the top and a narrow opening at the bottom. The more stuff you put in through the top (or have sitting in your marketing gravity reservoir), the more will come out the bottom to become clients.
Skip Weisman is founder of Weisman Success Resources Inc. For more information, please visit www.weismansuccessresources.com.