For any of you who have been in sales you realize that you control only a precious small portion of the success of any product. It is the job of the salesperson to help the customer recognize that there is a difference between their current state, and their desired state. We have to help them realize that they are dissatisfied with their current state and get them all "hot and frothy", as we said at Xerox, about the new product (desired state). Truth be told, that is only a very small part of a total strategic plan for any product. The first step is to get your potential customers aware that this new product even exists. Enter the Marketing team.
To give some background: Our sales team and Marketing team almost never work together. We had a few ceremonial meetings in the beginning and they actually had a hand in training us. Other than the first two weeks of employment we might have seen our marketing team, which consists of two people total, three times for about an hour each occurrence. Three hours in 7 months! Other than the obvious problems that are caused by the lack of time spent together there has been a relatively cordial relationship between the two teams.
About 4 months ago we received an e-mail from Marketing describing their "Marketing Plan". It consisted of sending out mass mailers to every dealer in the country by franchise. They were breaking those down by specific franchises in the order of best chance of success. The first mailer should have the most success. This is not necessarily a bad plan, but sending a mailer to everyone? What happened to target markets? I could go into a diatribe on target markets having a degree in Marketing, but I will not. So, the mailers went out and the response faxes came back. The sales team was excited about getting responses and we jumped on the chance to call these "hot and frothy" customers. Here were the response rates:
- 2281 letters mailed
- 51 Leads (2.5% response rate)
- 1 unit sold @ $XX,xxx.xx NET OT and $Xxx.xx NET Monthly
- 25 open prospects
Lets break this down.
- 2.5% response rate
- Sounds good right? 2.5% might be good for a random sample mailing however this was mailed to only our current customers. The average for a mailer of this type can be between 8% and 25% as defined by marketing standards. The 2.5% category is for things like your Sunday coupon circular.
- 1 Unit sold
- Out of 2281 potential customers that is a close rate of .04384%. Not even half of a percent. You might have a better chance selling vacuums door to door.
- 25 open prospects
- No one on the sales team even knows what this means. We have many more than 25 prospects but most of those came from our own out-bound activity. Not from the list.
Here are rough estimates of the cost of the campaign only for material:
- Postage: $.21 for bulk X 2281 = $479.01
- Printing costs (I did come from Xerox after all): $.03 x $68.43
- Envelopes: $.02 x 2281 = $45.62
Without giving exact numbers our Return on Investment was less than 2% only on material costs. This does not include paying salaries, heat, light, time, etc... In terms of an investment. we would have been better off buying a 6 month Savings Bond.
But, have no fear. We have just been told that the next mailer is right around the corner. If we keep this up, we might just get that 1 sale out of 2281 that is just sitting there ripe for the picking.
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