Relationship Marketing

Posted On: 2006-01-31
Length: 60:00

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Hello! Welcome to Small Business Trends radio. And I'm Anita Campbell. I'm your host for today. We've got a great show today. The topic is "Beating the Big Box Guys by Changing the Rules." John Wyckoff is today's featured guest. John will be telling all of us small business owners how not to fear the competition from big competitors, such as big box retailers, and he will be explaining how to grow your small business through relationship marketing.

But first, before we bring John on the show, we have the Today's Trend segment, a little feature that we do every week. Today's trend is about using email in your B2B sales prospecting. Now this may seem a strange topic to be talking about today when we're going to be discussing relationship marketing. But the thing that you have to remember about this trend is that it is a business to business trend. We're not talking about business to consumer when we talk about using email in your sales process. Now I've written quite a bit recently about this growing trend towards incorporating email communications into your business to business sales prospecting. It seems to be a controversial subject. Not everyone likes the idea of either sending or receiving emails in connection with sales pitches; in fact, traditional sales wisdom swears that email is too impersonal. But at the same time you can't deny that usage of email in the sales process is growing.

There's a terrific website called Marketing Sherpa, and through it I recently became aware of a survey from a company called Three Deep Marketing. The survey was about using communications in selling technology products. And I want to read to you one of the conclusions from that survey. "When gathering more information on technology solutions, communications preferences included email, website links, and web seminars. Getting a phone call from a sales rep was a resounding NO. In fact, a whopping 86% said they preferred to receive information about a technology product via email versus a sales-based phone call." Now in many ways these conclusions challenge the conventional wisdom. But do keep in mind that as our dependence upon electronic communications grows...