How many touches?

When you get a new lead, how many times do you touch them before you give up? By touch I mean contact, not physical touching obviously… but if you can actually meet them and shake their hand all the better, although that is frequently not an option.

Or worse, do you get a new lead and immediately hard sell them… bad, very bad.

You may have heard this analogy before, but here it is again. Did you meet your future spouse at a party, and right there, ask them to marry you? If you did, the result was probably not to your liking. You needed to establish a relationship first. Get them to know, like and trust you… it is EXACTLY the same for leads.

Very few people buy anything new by walking into the store and say “I’ll take that one.” Sure, some do for a very few things, but most go to several stores or several online sites, do some research and learn what they can about what is available, then buy the product that best meets their needs.

You need to lead the prospects down the same path so that they have no choice but to choose you and your product because you have developed a relationship with them and at some level, they know, like and trust you!

A few years ago a study was done and the results may surprise you:

• 2% of sales close on the 1st touch
• 3% of sales close on the 2nd touch
• 4% of sales close on the 3rd touch
• 10% of sales close on the 4th touch
• 81% of sales close after the 5th touch or more touches

If anything, these numbers today are worse. With all the scams and spam and ransomware and malware and less then ethical marketers out there, buyers are more wary today than they were when that study was done. That means that you have to work harder and touch them more before they are likely to buy from you.

Let me be clear what I mean by touching. I mean any form of contact with the lead/prospect. Email, direct mail, phone call, in-person meeting, SMS, e-book, real book, presentation, webinar, virtual meeting, shock and awe box, whatever you can think of. And the more media and ways you can touch the prospect the more likely they are to know, like and trust you and therefore buy from you. Of course, your product or service has to solve what they are looking to solve.

We have a product called JoomFuse that integrates a Joomla!® website with Infusionsoft's marketing automation platform. So, I can touch a prospect forever, but if they don’t use Joomla! or Infusionsoft, the chance of a sale is close to zip, zero, nada… Of course I can convince them to switch, but that is a different sale.

But for those for whom JoomFuse is a potential solution, we send them a free report, follow up with an informational email, offer a phone call, show them to our website where we offer live chat, then follow up with more information in another email and on it goes.

As Dan Kennedy said in a recent GKIC marketing newsletter, “…you win battles sequentially: you must first ‘get in the door’, then secure Attention, then create Interest, then have Permission to Sell, then Develop Trust, etc.”.

Combining multiple touches with a mindset of always giving immense value with each touch, with a series of touches that walks prospects down the path outlined above, leads to much greater success than the “Buy my stuff! Buy my stuff! Buy my stuff!” mantra. Give it a try and let me know the results.