Golden Leads

I’m trying to recruit both a new marketing director and a new sales executive.

I’ve received a lot of resumes for both positions and I’m floored by the amount of people who said they held “sales and marketing” roles at their previous companies.  As a serial entrepreneur, I really never worked anywhere else, however from my perspective “sales” and “marketing” are two distinctly different animals and I have no idea how you could do a good job doing both at the same time.

I did stumble upon an interesting “sales and marketing” story on the way to Costco with my wife the other night.  She was telling me that while at a doctor’s appointment she was reading an article in Selling Power that said that sales people usually see a dramatic increase in conversion rates of cold calls after the fifth call.  As a freelance copywriter, she is far removed from the sales trenches and found this stat staggering.  The common thread between this sales metric and email marketing is the old adage that repetition breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds trust.  I think that sales professionals have found an interesting wrinkle in the human psyche that after five phone-based impressions you can actually gain enough trust from a person to have them give their time to you and ultimately purchase something from you.  This is great stuff.

The lesson for email marketers is about frequency.  Due to the relatively low cost of email marketing we are able to create many more impressions than we could with traditional channels.  The challenge for email marketers is to seize the opportunity as a new lead enters the sales funnel and provide (five?) meaningful, relevant impressions to breed familiarity and also trust.  Timing of the impressions will vary depending upon your application, but I would generally like to see those five impressions within a 7 week period.  Back off on the frequency after that.  Give it a shot!  Send me your results!

P.S.  I’m off to Media Post’s Email Insider Summit tomorrow.  Stay tuned for lots of juicy blog posts from the conference.

Thanks to Email Marketing Blog for this great article.