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