All New CommentMILK Version 1.0Follow Up But Be Polite About It - Day 18 of COWpetition
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First of all we want to wish all you fathers out there a very happy Father’s Day!
It is hard to believe that there are only 3 more days of this COWpetition… our Video Game Reviews blog will be going up for sale on the 18th and we will also be organizing all the contest winners. If you have not registered yet, do not worry as you still have time to do it right now. Visit our COWpetition page for more details.
In yesterdays post we talked about how we approached potential JV Partners for promoting our new blog, today we want to talk about the importance of following up with them. Now please remember, this post is to explain how we did this with our COWpetition blog and that means there was a strict time frame of only 30 days involved, so we had to improvise on a few things.
One of the rules in sales is that it takes seven communications to make a sale, so that means that a sales person, on average, needs to communicate with a potential customer seven times before they finally buy from them. Now what this refers to is with cold calling, obviously if someone is in search for a product or service already and is looking for it, then it is much quicker to close a sale. When you are contacting potential JV Partners, you need to look at it like cold calling for a sale. You are trying to convince someone, who more than likely has never even heard of you before, that it is worthwhile for them to partner up with you.
Now to communicate with someone seven times is very effective but for us to do this in such a short time frame is not very wise. Being too aggressive can work against you and you will be considered a spammer. Another important point is to never threat anything. What we mean by that is say for example you requested a link exchange from someone (this is just an easy example, please do not argue whether link exchanges work 
), the most effective method is to post their link on your site first and then ask them to reciprocate. Well if after a week they do not reciprocate, do NOT email them and say that if they do not respond in 48 hours you will take the link down. OK, we confess, this example is a real life one and about 5 years ago we were guilty of trying it. All we can say is we got hammered by angry webmasters that used a lot of colourful language and the theme was that if we were requesting a favour from them then threatening was not a good move… we saw the error of our ways and 100% agree.
For the contacts that we had phone numbers for, our second contact with them was using the phone. When calling, often times you will get an automated voice system. You want to leave a message and you want to make sure that you sound as professional as possible. Do not stutter and just try to wing the conversation, make sure you have a script that you are following and rehearse it a few times. No one is going to follow up with you if the message sounds like a nervous person. You also need to make sure you make reference to the email you sent and the date and time you sent it, this way if the email was overlooked, you will spark an interest for them to go back and look at it.
It is urgent that you be fully confident in what it is you want from the person you are trying to contact, the more confident you are, the more assured that they will be in partnering with you. The most effective results for us seem to be simply introducing ourselves and mentioning that we were just following up on an email that we sent earlier and wanted to know if they had any questions.
For those that we did not have a phone number, we simply emailed them a friendly reminder. The way we formatted the reminder was that we know they are more than likely very busy and we wanted to follow up to ensure they received the email and to answer any questions they might have. We also included the original message with the follow up message.
In most situations the routine we follow is that we try to mail on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday only. Some say Sundays work well but we have not found that. We also follow up to the original message about 24 hours later. After that we would tend to follow up about once a week and after the seventh try if we have not received a response we stop contacting them. This time however, due to our time constraint, we only followed up a third time and that was it and this was one week from the original date of contact.
Remember, be polite, be respectful, plan out what you are going to say, rehearse it and be professional!
Well there are only two more posts left in this COWpetition and tomorrow we are going to talk about the powerful tool we used that we talked about a few days ago and then on Tuesday we are going to wrap up by talking about some odds and ends with the video game blog. We sure hope you have been enjoying the posts and we are making a promise to you that we have lots of cool things planned for this summer so make sure to subscribe to our list and stay up to date on everythign going on.
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Practicing a script is a good idea. It’s easy to get nervous when contacting individuals that can assist you, so I think I will try that. I find sometimes that it’s hard to even find a direct email to some people. Do you recommend sending to a general email address (like info.yourwebsite.com)? Or, if there’s a number, calling in and requesting their direct email address? How do you handle that?
Just curious.
Thanks for the great posts—I’ll miss my beef fix when it comes to an end!
Together, we are stronger.
Vicki Flaugher, the original SmartWoman
Vicki Flaughers last blog post..Open Letter to Internet Marketers: Top 3 Things To Stop If You Want To Sell To Women
If they have a form on their site, submit through the form. You also can look at the WHOIS info for the domain and they will sometimes have a lot of contact info there. The whois used to be easier to use but to protect privacy a lot of people now use a proxy to hide their contact info.
If there is a phone number, we have two basic scripts ready. One is for if a person answers and only says “hello”. This happens a lot as people put their home phone number and do not think someone is going to call. For this person we will simply talk to the person right there and then. This conversation tends to be a little more casual but you still want to be professional.
The second is for a professional automated voice service or someone who answers and sound professional. This one we will ask them who to best direct us to in regards to our request. They will often put you through to that person or if their voice mail. It is good to ask if there is an email address you could send the request to as well.
Thanks for the clarification, John. I appreciate it.
Vicki
Vicki Flaughers last blog post..Open Letter to Internet Marketers: Top 3 Things To Stop If You Want To Sell To Women
Hey John do you know how to integrate Aweber with Feedburner? I have done everything they ask yet it’s still not working.
Thanks.
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Helpful post as usual, I am definately going to miss this COWpetition posts. Can you please share more info on Awber with Feedburner?
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