Like every good sales and marketing company you have to ‘eat your own dog food’ so to speak, and so with Pitch121, although we’ve been fortunate to have referred business, we do believe in using our own process for our sales.
In doing so, we have some interesting first calls to our FANs.
Naturally, I’ve told them about the team, the people identifying our FANs and tracking their responses, the writers picking up conversations as soon as they come in, the sequence of messages over the months, changing according to job title, time of year, or how much that person has interacted.
As we talk through how our service works, I can feel the penny drop as the person I’m speaking to realises that they were on the receiving end of the Pitch121 service.
I usually get in first and tell them that “I hope they don’t mind, but you were ‘Pitch121-ed” and we look back at the natural looking exchanges and they can see the power of taking your time to have an actual conversation and waiting for interest to peak, or buying signs to be revealed.
I get asked, “Was that the real you?” My answer, “Sometimes!” “erm… no” or “That was me, but our systems flagged that the time was right to send another message”.
The benefit of meeting new clients in this way is that the fact that they are on the phone talking to me, proves that what we do, works…
One of my favourite conversations was with a Marketing Director, who recently signed up with us.
He declared he never speaks to sales people, and I asked him, what was it in my email that made him respond. Was it that I said we could help his Account Based Marketing, with a Profile-based approach? “No, he said, it was because you’d been really nice and helpful on LinkedIn, sharing my Webinar with your connections and asking how it went… I agreed to a call because what you do sounds interesting, but mostly because you were nice.”
There we have it. We all know the rules of networking. Don’t sell, give before asking, offer to help people, show you care, be yourself… Turns out it is just the same online.
It also turns out that our clients don’t mind being ‘Pitch121-ed’. They’ve been let into a well-kept secret, and they can see that we can be sure to take the time to have a real conversation, as them, to people they’d love to work with. Less bots, more humans.
If you’d like experience Pitch121, just email me [email protected]