Know-How Exchange : E-Marketing

According to best practices, you shouldn't just add these prospects to your mailing list but should get them to opt in. I have worked with a content marketing system extensively. Your general message should contain a blurb about your monthly enewsletter, offering an additional benefit if they sign up for it.

Wherever it is that prospects download your whitepaper( i.e. your website, an email), make sure there is a big Sign-up for your e-newsletter button beside the download whitepaper button.

Many companies do follow up downloads with qualifying phone calls. Our company never adopted this practice, but I think it is legitimate to call and get some feedback on the usefulness of the whitepaper and ask some other qualifying questions. During that phone call, you could also get permission to add the prospect to the enewsletter mailing list.

Finally, a sales person can follow up with a personal email as well, asking for feedback on the whitepaper, giving some more info on the company's services, offering newsletter sign-up, and perhaps even a special offer.

In my experience, most companies, even those you would fully expect to follow best practices, don't. Every time I personally download a whitepaper or watch a webinar, I receive continued follow-up correspondence. I am just advising on what best practices should be.

Out like to draw a distinction, if I may, between prospect qualification and prospect cultivation. Qualification is a process whereby someone from your firm, preferably an experienced salesperson, calls to see if the prospect is ready to buy right now. He salesperson will want to know, for example, if the person has the authority and budget to buy.

But there is a second issue, that of cultivation. Just like we might cultivate a crop in the field before we are ready to send in the reapers, so we may cultivate interest from a person who is not yet qualified to buy. In my opinion, it is unfair and unreasonable to expect commission salespeople to spend their time cultivating prospects.

The prospect of cultivating unqualified prospects over time can be an expensive proposition. Is this a good idea for you? To me, the answer depends on many variables. For example, do you have a unique product? If your products identical to everyone else's, you could spend a lot of time and money cultivating interest, only to have a prospect buy from a competitor. Do you have sufficient margins to afford a cultivation program? Do you have enough educational materials in place to provide information over time?

This basic issue of qualification versus cultivation is one which I have focused on for over 10 years. If you would like to discuss this further, please send me an e-mail (click on my profile to the upper right). Good luck.