The Benefits of Building Relationships with Prospects

In my last post, I made a case for building relationships with prospects by creating a series of contacts with prospects rather than asking them to hire you right off the bat. This system has a number of benefits over the standard approach of mass marketing or bombarding prospects with mailings they don’t want and don’t find useful. These include:

• It’s cheaper. Because you’re not asking prospects to take a leap of faith and hire you in your ad, they’re more likely to take action and request your free report (or something else of value). That means you generate more leads for every ad you run or mailing you send out.
  
  
• It’s less risky to prospects. Doing business with you is risky to prospects. How do they know you’ll do what you say? When you offer something of value for free, you build trust and give them a sampling of your services. It also gives them control of their buying process instead of feeling pressured. They can make decisions on their time and at their comfort level.
  
  
• Prospects contact you. No longer will you need to cold call and beg for new clients. With this system, they contact you - and as statistics show, that means you’re virtually in the door. 87% of all people call either one or two agents when they’re ready to buy or sell! And prospects who have received your communications for a period of time will be far less skeptical about hiring you. They’ll feel they already know you just from your marketing materials.
  
  
• It’s more targeted. Prospects that request your free report are raising their hands to let you know that they’re potentially interested - and therefore are more qualified than the average person.
  
  
• It’s less time consuming. Once you have a list of people who are interested, you can add them to your automated marketing system to follow up with them regularly. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every month because you’ve set up the system in advance.

I can’t stress enough that you should learn and use the principles of direct response advertising and permission marketing in all your marketing rather than doing what everyone else is doing. Once you learn these basic principles, test them in your market, and focus on conversion rates, you’ll stop bleeding advertising money and start to see why marketing is one of the most lucrative investments you’ll ever make.