Sales Prevention in Direct Marketing
Recently, someone from a roofing company knocked on my door. After some recent storms in the area, they were driving around looking for damaged roofs and prospecting for some business. Fair tactics, I thought. But… They handed me a piece of paper, a cheap A5 black and white flyer, with some bullet points about the company (I’ll call them XYZ Roofing and Maintenance company to protect their identity).What did I learn from their flyer?
On their wee flyer they listed their services with a footnote stating ‘Find us on yell.com‘. I was gobsmacked by this and considered why, in this day and age, anyone would ask me to ‘find’ them on any business directory (least of all Yell), especially when they had my direct attention, possible interest and possible desire – a marketer’s dream. They had done the hard part and got my attention. They had the opportunity to educate me on what they could offer me. And then they asked me to go and hunt around Yell, trying to navigate Yell’s listings, to find them.
A classic missed sales opportunity
A much better solution for them (and, more to the point, for me) would have been to direct me to their own company website where they could have conveyed their story to me. With their own website they could have been much more effective in:
Conveying their messages to me in their own words and pictures. Winning my trust. Telling me why I should use them and not their competitors. Showing examples of their work. Telling me what their happy customers say about them and how great XYZ Roofing Company’s services are. Promoting their work, accreditations, workmanship, prices, value for money, customer services, health and safety, etc.
This small company could be in charge of its own website, change and update its information whenever they want and be in control of how its customers and prospective customers perceive them. This is better than any Yell listing. Always.
If XYZ Roofing Company had its own website they could have shown me why I should use them instead of doing free marketing for Yell. Let’s face it, Yell can afford to pay for their own marketing costs rather than using the marketing budget of a small business.
And the result is!
To make matters worse, when I did ‘find’ them on Yell I spotted a few more roofing and maintenance businesses that gave the kind of information I needed to make a buying decision. And guess what? It wasn’t XYZ Roofing I selected. This is a fine example of a sales opportunity gone badly wrong.
So XYZ Roofing Company can thank Yell for being a sales prevention force and alerting me to their competitors who had their own website with a much better offering.
Moral of the Story
Sadly this is a fairly common story for lots of businesses, small and large, and particularly trade businesses.
As a business, you should have your own website and be in control of your own direct marketing – what you say to your customers and how you say it. Once you have done that and put your web address on your flyers (and all printed materials) then you can consider how to spread your message further using our internet marketing services.
If you are unsure how to go about this, call Toltech to get the answers.
