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In this issue:
• Marketing Article: Marketing: How to Build a Great In-House Mailing List
• Marketing Article: What does your brand stand for?

Marketing: How to Build a Great In-House Mailing List
by Susan Tatum © 2007

No matter what marketing tactics you use to generate and develop leads, nothing is more important than your prospect list. There are seemingly endless options for buying prospect lists – some a lot better than others and the better ones priced accordingly. But, very often the best sources of a list are right inside the company. Before you spend a dollar on buying or renting an outside mailing list, it pays to check out the following commonly overlooked in-house sources. Most companies can find enough prospects to fill the funnel for a while.

1. Your Sales and Marketing Database. This is by far the largest source of hidden prospects in just about any company. It may be your CRM application. It may be your Outlook database. It’s wherever your company stores (or perhaps more accurately “dumps”) names of contacts that weren’t ready to buy at that moment.

One company we worked with had a well-organized telesales effort that included 5 sales assistants identifying and contacting a minimum of 10 new prospects a day. This resulted in 250 new prospects added to the database every week. In most cases, these prospects weren’t ready to buy immediately, so the sales assistants made a note to re-contact the prospect in a few months. More often than not, the second phone call never took place. When we got involved, the database contained over 15,000 prospects who were in the right positions and the right companies to be potential buyers.

2. Current, Former and Inactive Customers. Even though everybody knows it’s far easier and cheaper to get additional business from existing customers, a surprising number of companies don’t actively cultivate this additional business. Ask yourself these questions: Are you maintaining good contact with your clients once the product is sold or the project has been completed? Are you looking inside your clients’ organization for a chance to meet other needs internally? Are you actively asking for referrals? If your answer to any of these questions is “no”, you could be ignoring your best source of new prospects.

3. Spreadsheets and Lists Stored on Your Server. Have you looked at your network servers lately? Sales and marketing folders in particular can be hiding some good lists. Just recently we took a look at a client’s server and found two recent convention attendee lists, three association membership lists, a strategic partner’s mailing list, and a target list that had been compiled for a 4-city seminar tour. None of these lists had been incorporated into the marketing database.

4. Info Requests from Your Website. Today it’s very easy to input web inquiries automatically into your CRM, but many companies don’t do that. Instead they have inquiries go directly to the sales staff for follow-up. Often, these never make it to the database. Your webmaster can probably create a list of all incoming inquiries that can then be compared to the active database. If not, track down the address to which inquiries are sent.

5. E-newsletter subscriptions. If you use a third-party email distribution vendor for electronic newsletters, you probably have a separate database growing on the vendor’s servers. These companies do a great job of managing subscription lists, but only the most sophisticated can automatically integrate with your internal database. This means your e-newsletter subscription list(s) are completely separate from your sales and marketing database, and are undoubtedly a very good source of untapped prospects. Comparing the two is also a good way to clean up email addresses in your active database.

6. Your employees. Everyone in your company is a potential source of prospect names. These could be people they’ve met at industry events, contacts who’ve sent in technical questions, suppliers and partners, friends and neighbors. It’s worth the effort to ask everyone to check their own lists and forward all potential prospects to the marketing department. Be sure to carefully define a “prospect” when you do this.

And after that … Once you’ve flushed out all of these sources, you can always pay to add new prospects. Mailing list rentals and purchases can get you a lot of names in a hurry, but we’ve found that home-grown lists are almost always the most effective. It may take a little more time to build your list yourself, but the quality will be far superior.

© The Tatum Group 2007

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Susan Tatum, President of TatumMarketing.com, helps business owners and leaders accelerate growth with effective, sustainable marketing programs. She publishes a free monthly newsletter, Better Marketing Now!, (http://www.tatummarketing.com/bettermarketingnow.htm) and for a limited time offers subscribers a free copy of her special report, How Business Leaders Ensure Marketing Success.

What does your brand stand for?
by Guy Richards © 2007

There’s a lot of talk about having brand values. What are they and why they are important.

There are many benefits to having a strong brand; but where does that brand come from and how is it developed?

Everything that exists begins as a vision in the mind and heart of its creator. We build many things in our lifetime, including homes, careers, and families. We have hopes and expectations for the long term outcomes of those things, and we have hopes and expectations for the success of the businesses we build.

Even though there are similar businesses in similar market segments, no two businesses can or should be alike. A baby is made from a mix of DNA, she receives from not just her parents but from all of her ancestors. A business grows from a base of the core values of its owner and all the people who’ve contributed over time to make the owner who she is today.

But few owners or leaders take their values into consideration when building their business. They feel compelled to put some type of vision, mission, and values down because the business books tell them they should. So they pick words and phrases that come out of a book, without really taking time to consider if those things are right for them and right for what they’re trying to build. Words and phrases like: customer-centric, empowered employees, innovative, and risk taking pepper countless business plans everywhere.

There are two big problems with using those or any other words, in your key business philosophy. First, each of us defines words slightly differently based on our experiences and education, this leads your staff and customers to have a slightly different set of expectations on how the company should live up to those values. Which leads to the second problem. People expect you to live up to them.

Therein lies the purpose of a business’s – and its brand’s – values. They are supposed to exist to guide the behavior and decision making of leaders and staff. They create expectations in the minds of employees and consumers. The leadership and the staff must live up to those values and live out those values every single day, in every single customer interaction, and in every single internal interaction. That’s right. The brand values also govern interactions between those inside the business.

Here’s where the problems begin for many businesses, just like they do for people.

When you say “Nothing’s more important than my health,” then regularly eat junk food, don’t exercise, and engage in dangerous behaviors, your actions are telling everyone that you don’t really believe what you say you believe.

It’s in those moments when a decision must be made that values appear. The more you wrestle with a decision, the more your values are in question. And a business is made up of people and holds the values of the people in power.

If you have the opportunity to take on a new client that could bring in a lot of money but you don’t feel the client is particularly ethical, or the contract would involve a great deal of travel and you say your family is important to you, those are moments when you’ll be choosing between two things you value and the one you value most will win.

Business owners and decision makers face these choices every day.

So, what do you value and how are those values demonstrated in your business and in your work?

In our next issue of BrandReturn Newsletter, we’ll share some additional ideas on identifying whether or not your company values are in line with the actions you and your staff take.

Your next step: Take some time to reflect on what you want to be known for and what you want your business to be known for. Make a list of those things. Compare them to your existing business values. Do your day-to-day actions support the things you’ve listed? If you have a staff, ask them to take an anonymous survey to identify when your actions are out of alignment with your stated values. Use a free or low-cost internet based tool like surveymonkey.com that will allow people to complete the survey anonymously

Stumped on how to take your service and your business to the next level? We’d love to discuss how we can help you do that. Drop us a note to start the conversation.

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About Abiah Designs
Abiah Designs is a brand strategy / full-service marketing firm whose unique, proprietary research process creates and revitalizes brands that resonate with their target markets, leads to increased brand awareness, develops strong customer loyalty and improved market share. Visit our website (www.abiahdesigns.com or blog www.brandreturn.com) to view our portfolio, read our case studies, and begin to imagine how we can help you.

To grow your brand call 609 653 2233.