Numbers

A while back I wrote about how I enjoy doing the number crunching on projects we've completed as part of the assessments into what worked best, what didn't, lessons learned etc. Well, I've been going a bit number crazy and spent far too long figuring out these facts and figures...I'm feeling tired just thinking back on all this.

Our agency this year has...

Validated or appended over 32,000 names in companies all over North America
Set up 526 appointments with hot leads (that’s more than one a day - wow!)
Sent 10,000 emails to qualified leads who wanted to get hold of an educational offer
Dialed... WAY too many people that I want to remind our in-house calling team
Drunk our way through pounds and pounds of coffee (and three broken coffee makers) in an effort to KEEP THOSE DIALS GOING!

It's time for a rest - roll out the turkey I say, and let's give thanks to a heck of a year

Kate Writt
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

The DNA of a Successful Cold Caller

I was asked recently what qualities are common among the most successful telemarketers…..especially those that excel at cold calling. The art of cold calling is just that, an art, a craft and not everyone is cut out for it.

Anyone is capable of picking up a phone and making a call. And, you’ll find that if they make enough dials something is almost surely going to fall into their lap. But, that can get very expensive and can leave a lot of potential sales opportunities on the table.

We have all known that one rep on a team that seems to be head and shoulders above their peers and it’s not always the most professional, most organized or most eloquent. In a lot of cases, you can scratch you head and wonder why they are successful when they seem like the quirkiest person in the group.

A common factor that I find comes into play with these individuals is attitude. Not everyone is born with the luxury of being in a great mood all the time - that’s right, you’re not the only one! I’ve heard a lot of different methods that work for people whether it’s something they do to prepare for their day or a tactic they use for mid day attitude adjustments. The CEO of a company I worked for years ago told me he liked to turn up his car stereo as loud as his speakers could take a listen to “I Believe I Can Fly “ by R. Kelly on his way in to work. He’s the CEO of a very successful company so if it worked for him….. I tried it and realized I’m much more a rock and roll guy. If you find yourself in an emotional rut mid day? Try taking a short walk. A little exercise is a great way ground yourself.

A lot of top performers can roll with the punches of the day unfazed. They are realistic about their opportunities. There is no fear of failure and therefore the consequences are less severe. Your prospects and gatekeepers can really pick up on the subtle confidence this conveys. However, if you encounter someone who is rude because it’s not a convenient time to talk, they’re having a bad day, you remind them of someone they don’t like or they detest sales calls in general….chalk it up, relax and look forward to the next call. It’s gonna happen to the best of us so don’t sweat it.

The final attribute the best cold callers seem to have in common is that they tend to be extremely skilled listeners. “Let me learn what you need” rather than showing you what I know!” The old saying goes “a guy who buys a drill isn’t interested in a drill, he’s interested in a hole” The better you are at listening the more effective you are in identifying the problem this prospect wants to solve and helping them get to the bottom of it. From there they will decide to do business with you on their terms if they trust and like you.

These are just a few of my thoughts on the subject and I’d love to hear yours.
What qualities have you observed in your top performers that set them apart from the rest?
Chris Carson

Don't Skip the Human Step

We all know that the marketing process supports many stages; building awareness, generating response, nurturing a lead, etc. But the one not listed and possibly the most important is the ‘human step’ where two people actually start talking… about their business, the stuff they’re worrying about…

Getting people to talk to you in a B-to-B lead generation situation is one of the trickiest things to do in person, and presents an even bigger challenge over the phone. With everything people have to deal with in life today it’s easy to be caught up in your own devices and overlook the step of developing true business partnerships in which the stakes are shared. Many people will simply never work with you if you can’t demonstrate that their business really means something more to you than a paycheck.

I put an emphasis at every step on trying to make a real connection with people which requires a step back from your task at hand (delivering sales) to really talk to someone with some sincerity. Interests, hobbies, family, recent events, what makes them tick? Maybe you two have something in common. Even better, maybe you have something in common with their boss! Discovering what's real in their life can really pay dividends in setting yourself apart from the barrage of approaches they routinely get. Remember if they're your target they're likely the target of dozens of other B-to-B marketers. Respect their time and help them understand that you are realistic about what they'd have to see from you to really consider working together. "Obviously if you never reach that level of confidence in me/my company we won't be working together, right?" If you can demonstrate to someone that you're willing to take the time to help solve their challenges with their best interests at the forefront of the solution your success and referral rate will leave you smiling at the end of the day.

A lot of today's salespeople could really use a shift from the self serving culture of the past to a practice of relationship selling. If people like you, they're much more willing to invest time in considering what you have to offer. So don't skip the human step!

Chris Carson
Business Development Manager
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

The Concept of Laser Advertising

Here at Dunthorpe we’ve noticed a growing trend in 2010 –companies are fine tuning their marketing by focusing on a small highly targeted group of companies that offer them the best opportunity for business - Target Account marketing. This kind of focus could be driven by smaller budgets this year combined with aggressive new business goals. But with Target Account marketing we’re consistently seeing this kind of approach paying off.

It goes like this: you pick 500 to 1,000 companies that match the profile of your ‘best’ customer. You build out a list that includes two or three people in each organization that are confirmed to have the responsibility and the need. Then you invest in frequent and regular marketing ‘touches’ that motivate responses, and lead to a conversation with them.

Over time you’ll find that you may have been able to get into a dialogue with 10% to 15% of your targeted accounts, and in turn, your sales team has started the sales process with this high end group.

The cost per ‘touch point’ may be slightly higher than your usual programs, but the pay off is very different. And consider it this way, how much would it cost to do a more general marketing program to a much larger audience in order to get responses from high level decision makers at 15% of your top accounts? Far better to fine tune it right at the start, knowing that any interaction with a Target Account prospect has far greater value. We’ve been calling this ‘laser advertising’ to help contrast the value gained from each Target Account interaction compared with a general advertising or marketing program.

Another payoff which makes everyone happy is that marketing can really help pave the way for their sales colleagues. The TA marketing program will have raised awareness, positioned the organization as an expert in the field, and prompted some interaction. Then sales get involved and leverage that momentum to do what they do really well: building a personal relationship and closing deals.

So there you have it – Target Account marketing or ‘laser advertising’ – to your most important audience. I’ll be presenting some best practices and lots of case studies looking at different programs that took this approach in our next educational webinar and I hope you’ll join me.

With thanks
Mairi Burns
Director of Client Services
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

Back to School = Back to Business

The signs are all around us…the days are getting shorter, the nights are a little cooler, and everyone is talking about having to drag their kids out of bed in the morning. Clearly, summer is over - not only for the kids and teachers but for all of us in the office. There is a definite ‘back to business’ feeling around here. I’m sure you know the vibe I’m talking about, i.e. Q3 is over today, what are we doing for Q4, what’s our plan for 2011?

Now don’t get me wrong, as much as I hate the school traffic on my way to work every morning, as a project manager - I love this time of year! It’s a great time to analyze the success of current projects and programs, what worked best, and what didn’t. More importantly though, it also indicates new goals, in-depth planning and the start of new projects and programs to help our clients achieve their objectives. Have you started your program planning? What factors are influencing your planning decisions? Need help planning – give us a shout or join us for our upcoming webinar and learn how to plan, create and develop a strategy for a target account program.

All this of course means more work, but fortunately that isn’t the only by-product of this time of the year…there are also many other great things to look forward to. For example, getting out your favorite sweater, those tasty fall beers (yum!), freshly ripened apples, the leaves changing colors, your Halloween costume ideas…what else?

Kate Writt
Senior Project Manager
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

How to get more “butts in seats” at your webinar or face-to-face event

This is a pretty common challenge: needing to get more people at your event - and there are three quick answers to the question:
You can…
Get more people to register
Get more people to attend
Or, if all else fails, invite more people

GET MORE PEOPLE TO REGISTER
I have had more than a few conversations regarding how to increase the registration rate for events. We have achieved response from the industry average 1% to a whopping 11% and more. Assuming you are offering compelling content, it’s usually the invitation that makes the difference. So, here are my eleven tips for the best performing invitations:

1. Sell the event, not the product or company
Often companies are quick to include product or service value propositions in an event invitation. The goal of an event invitation should be getting people to register. You can sell products later.

2. Personalize all invitations
The most successful invitations are those that look exclusive. If it appears you have invited thousands, or even tens of thousands, your response rate will be much lower. If you send a personal invitation (email or direct mail) that has more of a custom-feel, it has a better chance of getting through the gatekeeper, will grab attention and drive the response higher. (Also, it’s a pretty fair rule that the more senior the audience, the more custom and exclusive the invitation.)

3. Invitations should be copy-heavy
OK – here’s the one that can launch a debate. The prevailing wisdom is to keep invitations short with a focus on only a few main points to make it easy for someone to skim for the main ideas. Well – that isn’t how event invitations really perform and we’ve tested a ton of them. If you want to convince someone to invest an hour or more of their busy day, you have to prove it’s worth their time. If you don’t believe me, give it a test. Longer, detailed copy will always outperform the synopsis.

4. Make sure all of the event content is included in the invitation
Don’t leave it for the landing/registration page. Only a small percentage will actually make it to the landing page, so put your best and complete content in the invitation.

5. Invitation style and content should match event type
Make sure the content is relevant to the specific audience. For example, a highly technical/engineering presentation will not be of interest to senior executives who would be drawn to a round table discussion of business issues.

6. Email invitations work best for webinars, direct mail invitations work best for seminars and other face-to-face events.

7. Direct mail invitations that work
Business letters have good registration track record,
while postcards have poor registration track record (see
tip #3 about including more copy). Avoid marketing
“glossy” invitations (see tip #2 about making invitations
look exclusive)

8. Send at least 2 invitations
You can vary the type: 2 emails, 2 direct mails,
direct mail + email, tele-invitation + email, etc.

9. Tele-invitations provide the opportunity for dialogue which will generate non-registrant leads. There are many more people interested in the event invitation than will actually register. Let’s face it – some people never attend events. When you call to invite people to an event, you can qualify their interest and give a giant boost to the lead results. Also, tele-invitations have the highest registration rate of all other invitation options.

10. Include a 3rd party endorsement for the event (not the product, see tip #1). Include a quote from other people who have attended your events to promote the value of spending the time at the event. Or, include a list of event alumni on the invitations.

11. Make it easy to register by offering several response options. Believe it or not, not all registrations are done online. We still get a percentage of registrations from inbound phone calls.

GET MORE PEOPLE TO ATTEND
You can also increase the number of “butts in seats” by improving your attendance rate. The industry average for webinar attendance is 30-50% and for executive breakfast/seminar/other face-to-face event attendance is 50%.

To improve these results, we recommend five confirmation and reminder activities:
Send registration confirmations immediately on registration
1. Call to ask registrants for speaker questions
We call a week before an event to ask if the registrants have any specific
questions for the speaker, which increases their commitment to attending.
2. Email reminders to registrants weekly
3. Reminder phone calls 1-2 days before the event
4. Email reminder 2-3 days before the event and 1 hour before a webinar
One note: Make sure every communication resells the value of the event.

INVITE MORE PEOPLE
It’s your choice. You can certainly double your attendees by doubling the number of people you invite, but this can be a very expensive option…..

I hope that’s given you a really diverse and packed tool box to drive greater registration and attendance. If you would like to dig into some more details on how to make your webinar or face-to-face events even more successful, please sign up for our next educational webinar where I’ll be sharing my 9 keys to maximizing events for lead generation and sales opportunity creation.

Susan Linman

Go Blazers – putting the ‘personal’ back in marketing

After a couple of years of email blasting hell, I think consumers (and we’re all consumers in one form or the other) are going back to the old fashioned notion of relationships: where a company that wants to sell you its products takes some time and effort to find out something about you and makes its message and communications relevant to you, your likes and dislikes and the issues that keep you awake at night. Behind it is the simple notion that we all would prefer to deal with people ‘just like us’ who share our particular likes and passions, or at least understand why it’s important to you whether the Blazers will make the playoffs this upcoming season.

In that line I’m a great fan of using this kind of information to enhance one-to-one marketing communications: and lots of CRM systems today have the ability to record a client or prospect’s hobbies or interests. Certainly there’s lot of data out there about how a more personalized approach in marketing enhances results, and I think we could still do a lot more to make our communications feel really personal and relevant to every individual. It’s what good sales people have been doing for years - typically carrying it around in their heads: a prospect’s favorite hobby, or the college they attended and whose team they never miss. This information can be very useful in marketing/sales campaigns once you get past the initial challenge of capturing it and getting it in your CRM system.

Great, so now that you know that your contact likes golf, what can you do with this information other than make small talk? One idea is to try and incorporate your prospect’s interests in the subject lines of marketing communications. For example, instead of sending out a webinar invitation with a standard/generic subject line like- “10 Ways to Increase Your Bottom Line”, you might use a header/subject line like “10 Great Approach Shots to increase the Bottom Line” to the 20% of your database that you know have an interest in golf. Or let’s say that you have identified that 15 % of your contacts like baseball. They would be more likely to respond to the header, “10 Ways to Knock Your Bottom Line into the Upper Deck.” Granted, these personal touches will need a little extra care, but you are going to see an uptick in performance. Your prospects and clients know that you’re trying… and they might even remember that you’re also a fan of their favorite team. And who could resist that?

Vincent Hurst
Business Development
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

Treasures of My Desk

I don’t care how corny this sounds but I absolutely love the direct mail pieces from the US Post Office!

I’m a pack rat, I admit it. I love keeping things around; you never know when you’re going to need them! It’s that time of year again, time to clean out my desk because I can’t fit one more piece of paper in the drawers, and the files and folders stacked on top of my desk are getting kind of tipsy … they’re just asking for trouble. So in the midst of cleaning out my desk I ran across my file of direct mail samples I’ve been collecting the last year. There were a few that finally made it into the recycling bin, a few I just haven’t decided if they’re good enough to last another year in my desk, and then those handful that have definitely made it to the next round.

I must say, if you’re not on the US Post Office direct mail list, it’s time to get on it; their creative/designers have come up with some great stuff over the last year. Three of the five pieces that made it into the save pile are all from the USPS.

The first one, is one of the most true to life file folders I’ve ever seen designed/printed. It’s a six page piece that looks like an actual file folder; handwritten notes across the whole thing, binder clips, scraps of paper, post-its…surprisingly like all those folders I pulled from my desk and recycled, but not this one! This one has highlighter marks all over, even a napkin with a coffee ring on it and notes scribbled across it… the designer did a fabulous job graphically. The mail piece itself is promoting a free DVD about Results-Driven Marketing in the Down Economy and the entire piece, copy and design, is a perfect compilation.

One of their other pieces was quite entertaining, I even got a shirt out of the deal! It comes with the classic “Hello my name is” sticker as the address label on a plain white envelope. I couldn’t help it; I wanted to see what was inside. You open it up and it has nearly a dozen (sticky, usable) “Hello” badges but they are just beyond entertaining…Hello my dream job is , Hello my biggest pet peeve is, Hello my office nickname is, Hello my favorite way to look busy is… ! Those proved to be quite entertaining around the office! They send you to a personalized URL to fill out some personal “Hello my…” information and then print your customized shirt with a series of six “Hello” badges on it that describe you to a tee and mail that out. I love my shirt! What was the point of the mailing? Personalized and Database Printing… what a great way to prove your point that personalized mail is more enticing and interactive.

I love well built direct mail pieces, big kudos to the designers for the USPS this year!

Sadly, I didn’t find a million dollar check hiding in my desk, but these sure did make me smile. What treasures are hiding in your desk?



Ashley Keller
Project Coordinator
Dunthorpe Marketing Group, Inc.

Can I help you ma’am?

I had a wonderful customer experience the other day at the department store Nordstrom’s in Portland that, yet again, proved to me why I’m a loyal and enthusiastic customer of that chain (and I mean, really enthusiastic…).

I recently bought a waterproof watch there that was having some problems (nothing to do with wearing it swimming with my 3-year old), and as I wandered past the jewelry counter the nice lady there asked if she could help me… Spontaneously I told her about the watch (that I’d bought there a few months back) and without any prompting or pleading on my part, she instantly offered to swap it – without proof of purchase or me having to swear on my granny’s bible that I was telling the truth.

It was a wonderfully personable reminder of how much we all love getting great service. Somehow that feels like an old fashioned notion; that good manners, treating people respectfully, and doing your best by them, is still enough to keep you ahead in business. But it really does work and it’s still really relevant. We marketers may wrap it up in fancy ribbons but at the end of day, every person wants to feel that their business matters to your business…

I’ve worked in client services on the agency side for over 15 years and it’s a part of the business that I really love (well, duh) mostly because it’s all about people; their perceptions, their needs, their pressures, and the huge variability that comes with the territory. My job is to make the client’s job easier – and make working with the agency something that’s actually quite fun and rewarding rather than painful. Yes, I’ve had my share of difficult situations… but on the whole it’s been a blast…. taking care of people… just like my new best friend Stephanie at Nordstrom’s.

Mairi Burns
Director Client Services
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

Building a Targeted List

One of the best ways to save budget this year is limiting your marketing programs to targeted prospects only. It’s a sound strategy because you don’t have to shave the number of touches, creative or media, if you just cut the list of campaign recipients.

Sound easy? Well, it’s not hard – it just takes a few extra steps.

The first step is honing in on the specific criteria for a target contact and target account. You will want to reach contacts with the ideal title and responsibilities within accounts that match size, location, industry and other qualifications that make them probable customers. The more detailed the criteria, the better the list.

It is possible to rent or purchase a list through specialized industry sites and publications.

But, often the very best target lists are built through a series of steps:
1. Get a list of the target companies that match your criteria – if you don’t have the list internally, you can purchase a list of companies from Jigsaw, D&B, InfoUSA or other business databases. Get the closest contact name to your ideal title.
2. Pull the names you already have in your internal database from these specific companies.
3. Call into companies to verify the contacts that match your targets and add new target contacts
4. Load list into your database marked as target contacts and target accounts

This process might sound like it will be too time consuming or costly. However, when you think about the money you save in programs, it pays for itself many times over.

And you never want to forget the old rule:
“You will get better results sending a mediocre piece to a great list, than a great piece to a mediocre list.”

Susan Linman

Records.

I’m not talking about the round, vinyl ones – although those are pretty neat too. I’m talking about the highest or best rate, amount, etc., ever attained; an unsurpassed statistic.

Right now in Portland we are experiencing heat records – 4 days straight of 100+ degree weather and a new overnight low record of 75 degrees. Here in Portland we just aren’t used to this weather – it really does rain here the majority of the year!

At Dunthorpe, the heat isn’t the only record we are experiencing though…we are proud of some recent records we delivered for our clients, including:

• A multi-touch campaign that delivered an incredible 23% conversion to appointment rate.
• A data append project where we added 617 key contacts at target accounts using telemarketing and we even added email addresses and opt-in permission for 98% of them
• A customer cross-sell program that generated 294% more interest and pipeline than expected.

I hope your immediate reaction is, “gee these guys are good.”

And, although these specific results are outstanding, more important is our overall track record of planning, executing and measuring programs that meet and exceed our client’s expectations over and over.

Well, that and some of the various awards and records that our talented team has accomplished outside of work:

• Winner of the New York Press Association ‘Photographer of the Year’ 1990
• Member of the Valparaiso University trivia team that won the National Collegiate Trivia Competition in 1976
• Creator of the Guinness Book of World Records largest greeting card
• Member on the 2008 National Six-Touch Rugby Team

(Oh and we have other interesting talents and honors too like a degree in applied physics with concentrations in astronomy and astrophysics, a commercial pilot, can say the alphabet backwards in 15 seconds, and can play the accordion).

Do you have an interesting record of your own? What records can we help you reach?

Kate Writt
Senior Project Manager
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

Why aren't Customers getting more Marketing Attention?

Here at Dunthorpe we get to experience firsthand how this economy has impacted marketers trying to generate leads with less resources and greater pressure to deliver. In these stressful times folks are going to use every trick in their marketing toolbox to create sales opportunities. That means using lead generation techniques that traditionally yield the best performance in a b-to-b audience – like telemarketing – (and certainly that’s been our experience) – combined with emerging and low cost techniques like social media marketing or email to augment their potential reach and performance.

All well and good.

So here’s the rub… why is it that companies are not making more of one of their best performing audience groups… their current customers? It’s been known for years that customers are the best (and cheapest!) source of new business. Here are some stats from Sirius Decisions…
- 80% of new business revenue comes from existing customers
- Customers tend to respond 3x more than non-customers
- It takes HALF the number of customer contacts to deliver TWICE the deals compared to new prospects
- It costs FIVE times more to find a new customer than it costs to keep an existing one

Pretty amazing data… Our agency has experienced the same kind of behavior: programs that go back to customers for up-sell or cross-sell promotions are performing incredibly well. In one program we converted 23% of the customer list to a sales callback: or one third of the number of people we were able to speak with directly. In fact, we delivered 1500% more appointments than we had anticipated (no, this is not a typo and yes, this is a crazy number!).

And in another cross-sell program, one out of every three customers we connected with asked to speak with their rep about the offer. That beats the usual performance of appointment-setting programs about six times over – a huge up-tick and a really quick and easy way to uncover sales opportunities that will convert faster than prospects because there’s a relationship and trust already established.

You can imagine that these kind of performance metrics have gotten us (and our clients) pretty excited – and it’s prompted lots of discussion as to why corporate marketing departments – and their sales counterparts – tend to exclude customers from their focus. There are a couple of reasons that we’ve figured might be contributing to this – I’d really like to hear from other marketers to see if these match up to your experiences.

1. It’s all about the quota: I’m pretty sure the biggest reason customers don’t get their deserved attention is down to the numbers, targets and quotas that Marketing and Sales Departments are tasked with delivering each quarter. You know the drill: Marketing needs to deliver 1,500 leads per month to Sales: then Sales has to convert so many of those leads to Opportunities, RFPs, pipeline and so on. Focus is typically on generating ‘new’ opportunities with ‘new’ organizations i.e. expanding the empire without really focusing on investing efforts on those segments that deliver the most.
2. Can’t get anywhere near them: we speak to lots of marketing organizations in the country and they’re working really hard to deliver new business. When we ask them about the potential opportunities to market to customers, often we hear that some other department ‘owns’ the customer relationship and it’s strictly off limits to Marketing. Usually Sales or Customer Services ‘owns’ that relationship and it’s closely guarded against possible interlopers. Fair enough – you do want to be sure that relationship is treated with respect. But often what happens is that customers are closed off from any central co-ordinated marketing efforts and so are left to languish in the hinterland. Maybe that explains their reaction when offered a conversation with a sales rep: lots of “yes please” or even scarier… “I haven’t spoken to a rep in years – YES PLEASE!”

So if you’re seeing some of these behaviors in your organization then join our enthusiastic effort to make customers the Marketer’s New Best Friend in 2009….your customers and executive team will thank you for it.

Mairi Burns
Director of Client Services
Dunthorpe Marketing Group

Speedy Summer Programs

I thought I’d share a trend we have been seeing in the past couple of months. More and more companies are adding or increasing their telemarketing efforts for lead generation. The number one reason for this shift seems to be the speed of sales conversions and generating revenue. Other lead generation programs are delivering leads, but the average time between generating the initial lead and scheduling an appointment can take months.

In contrast, a new calling program can be developed and launched within a couple of weeks. In fact, a call can propel a prospect from creating awareness, identifying interest and qualifying the sales opportunity to scheduling an actual appointment in a single call (or multiple calls made within a few days of each other).

We’ve been working on calling projects this summer that include:
• Cold calls to target accounts to schedule appointments for sales executives
• Follow up qualification calls to other lead generation program responses to accelerate the next steps
• Customer calls for up-selling and cross-selling
• Data append calls into target accounts to identify specific decision makers

Let me know if you’d like to learn more about how these programs are working. You may rediscover the power of the phone, two-way dialogue and the building of personal relationships.

Susan Linman

Happy Anniversary

Happy Anniversary

This week marks Dunthorpe Marketing Group’s 13th anniversary. And, despite the ongoing economic tough news….I’d say we’ve had a very lucky year.

First, a bit of history. I founded Dunthorpe Marketing Group after twelve years with Sequent Computer Systems (now IBM). I decided at the time of my second sabbatical to do something different with my lead generation and marketing experience. I learned in early July 1996 that you can start a company in one day. You just make the first call and say, “Hi, this is Susan with Dunthorpe Marketing Group….” and voila, you have a new company.

One of my first calls was to a former Sequent colleague who hired our agency (which was initially just me and my black lab) as the first agency of record for CareerBuilder.com. And, Dunthorpe Marketing Group was launched.

My goal was to create the agency I always wanted to hire when I was in my corporate role. Basically, an agency that understood my business, had direct industry experience, had a successful track record, was fun to work with and didn’t take more time to manage than they saved.

If you talk to our clients today, I think they would say we are that agency. And, we are having a great time. Our clients are exceptional, our team is extremely talented, we’ve been very busy, we’re exceeding some very high bars and we’re having fun every day.

Happy 13th anniversary.

I think we’re lucky indeed.

Susan Linman

A Good Question

Many of the social media sites have expereienced a real surge in the asking and answering of questions. The ensuing discussions can be quite interesting, thought provoking and worth the read. Not to mention the value of participating in these discussions in terms of SEO, exposure and thought leadership.

My day-to-day interactions with clients are peppered with questions and answers. Usually they center on practical advice from our experiences, best practices and what’s working with our clients. Here’s a typical question from last week:

“How long do you keep touching a contact before assuming they are not a viable lead?” I thought that was a very good question, but before I could answer, she continued. “……3 weeks, a month?” I was about to say 12-18 months before learning there was such a big delta between our approaches.

I tried easing into my answer. First, I first pointed out the typical buying cycle after generating a lead:
– 11% purchased within three months of inquiring
– 17% purchased within four to six months
– 25% purchased within seven to 12 months
– 47% bought in a year or more

Then I hoped my answer of 12-18 months would resonate as they considered the number of opportunities they would be abandoning after just a mere few weeks.

Have a question? Send it to me. I promise to return a quick, practical answer.

Susan Linman
susan@dunthorpemarketing.com

New Website and First Blog

June 16, 2009

Welcome to our new website and our first official blog. Before starting, I asked for advice on what constitutes a good blog. These are the recommendations I received:

Set a schedule. Blog often.
Don't worry if your posts suck a little.
Susan: Whew, that’s a relief…..
Write casually but clearly. Write quickly.
Add something new.
Join the bloggy conversation.

I’m thinking about the shoemaker’s children today. You know the story of that old shoemaker who outfitted his clients with new shoes, while his own kids went barefoot.

That story applies to us and our (very) old website. We even had a prospective client say he almost didn’t call us because our website was so outdated. Ouch. We’re glad he called. So is he.

Now I am pleased we have launched this new website and I hope it better represents our company, experiences and value to clients. I hope you’ll find the resources helpful and filled with ideas you can put to use.

Thank you for visiting.

Susan Linman