Letters? Cold Calls? Email?

Hey guys,

I am involved in a start up with another guy, we've been working on our SEO company for awhile and he's been paying for me to create all of the content on his website.

He's offering me a good share of the profits if I'll do sales to local companies for him. I have experience on the phone doing warm lead cold calls for a different company and product, but I've never done completely cold calls, shouldn't be too hard though, I'm definitely not afraid of the phone.

But I've been reading about the 7878 method and it looks interesting, I'm thinking of doing that to see if I can't get some good warm leads, I have no problem meeting in person to close sales.

I've heard about emails as well, how do people prospect this way? By just sending personal letters?

I've also thought about doing walk-ins but it seems that the general consensus is that this doesn't work as well as cold calls.

What do you guys think? I've been doing a lot of research but it seems that most people on here sell ORM, is it all that different selling SEO?

Thanks,

- David

Short answer:
All three commutation methods do work to some degree. Its just a matter how you implement them.

Long Answer.
I sold commercial printing and marketing services for 11 years. When I first started selling print I was hustling business cards to anyone who would buy them. This was a short sales cycle, which I need large volume of orders to make any money. Also the lifetime value of the customer was low. They would maybe spend $1K a year, which I averaged around 10% commissions on. I did this mainly canvasing (in person cold calls) and phone cold calls.

As my sales skills grew so did what I sold. I stopped chasing business cards and start selling programs, which had a high value to my client and to my company. I would look for companies that I thought would spend $250K or more on printing and related services, per year. On average most customers would stay with me for 4.5 years. So the lifetime value was right around $1M. To land these customers, I had a process. I would touch them 8 times before I would drop them from my list. Usually after 4-5 touches I would get some sort of feedback, either "we are not interested", "wrong time" or "lets talk"

Below is the process I developed. It worked well for me, but everyone is different.
1. dimensional mailer
2. phone call
3. email
4. phone call
5. phone call
6. email
7. letter
8. phone call


My point, is figure out the average lifetime value of the customer and spend your time, money and resources accordingly. The higher the lifetime value of the client, the more people (your competitors) are trying to win work from them.

The old saying that ?sales is a numbers game? is true. However, most sales people stop after 1 or 2 touches.

Remember, every person who says ?no? to you, makes you one more ?no? closer to the person who will say ?yes?.