Your Feet Are Too Small

By Gil Cargill, Sales Acceleration Coach

No, this isn't an article about buying or selling shoes. Rather, the reference I make in the title is to the size of your marketing footprint. In today's very crowded, very competitive sales arena, the team that has the biggest and best marketing footprint is, more often than not, the team that gets the majority of new leads. Let's examine the two components of your marketing footprint.

• Reach: The first of these is your reach. Reach is determined by examining the number of demographically desirable opportunities in your marketplace. Once you've determined how many opportunities exist in your market, you should compare that number to the number of contacts in your database. It's relatively easy to determine the number of demographically desirable companies in any geography by contacting a list broker.

Once you've contacted the broker, ask him/her for a count of demographically identical companies to those companies that you've already sold and served. A list broker will ask you some questions to define what the attributes are of the companies that you've served. Once that's done, the broker will provide you with a count. This service is most often offered without charge or obligation by list brokers.

So, if the broker says there are 10,000 companies in your marketplace and you have 100 companies in your marketing database, then your reach is one percent. Your goal should be to reach 100 percent of those demographically desirable companies. Obviously, this is a goal that's difficult to achieve but, the closer you get, the more leads you'll receive.

• Frequency: The second and most important variable in your marketing footprint calculation is frequency. Even if you have 100 percent of the demographically desirable companies in your database but aren’t touching them often enough, you will not generate enough leads to satisfy your growth and profit goals. Recent studies show inbound inquiries need to be responded to within a matter of minutes.

As a matter of fact, a gentleman named Dr. Oldroyd at MIT published a showing the difference between a five-minute response and a 10-minute response is a reduction in the probability of success by 400 percent! When I learned that, I was alarmed because I can remember when three, four, or even five days was considered appropriate response to an inbound inquiry.

Perhaps my age is showing (LOL), but today's reality requires very rapid response and frequent, repetitive touching. The frequency that Dr. Oldroyd recommends is 15 touches in 15 days. His study is very scientific, and he looked at thousands and thousands of leads and determined these optimum success factors.

So, what's your frequency? If you're adhering to the old-school philosophy of 6.7 touches in one year (I've preached that thousands of times in the past forty years), you're probably missing some opportunities. I encourage you to dramatically increase the frequency of touching your customers.

A little simple math of Reach X Frequency will help you determine your marketing footprint. The bigger the footprint, the more inquires you'll receive. These are two variables that are very easy to control.