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Staying Top of Mind with your Customers

November 5, 2011 By

Gerald Jampolsky said: To give is to receive.

As SEs we jump from customer to customer trying to bring in new business all while keeping existing customers happy, staying up on our products, and being in-the-know with industry developments. With just a fraction of your most valuable time spent face to face with your prospects, how can you keep that connection alive and well after you’ve gone. 

In the book Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi, one of the main tenets of the book was to establish a process for keeping a newly established relationship fresh and relevant. Forgive the techie analogy, but relationships evaporate in much the same way RAM loses it’s content if power isn’t supplied at regular intervals. Such is the rapport you just spent a few hours on the plane or road and in meetings building with your prospect.

You can break down the solution into three areas:

  1. Permission
  2. Platform
  3. Punch

Permission

Read Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing to gain full understanding of the value of obtaining “permission” or buy in from someone for you to contact them again. They are “paying” you with their attention, and they can easily stop payment at any time.
When you come across a new contact and you build some rapport, use that opportunity to explain that you occasionally distribute some form of communication (we’ll get to that in a moment). Get their approval before you follow up with them.

Platform

Depending on your industry and target audience, there are several ways to build a platform to handle distribution. You need something that:
  • Easily allows you to add/subtract people
  • Even better if it allows people to do it themselves
  • Allows you to segment or “tag” your list members by category
  • Is separate from your company’s infrastructure
Your platform could be as simple as an email list you build which you can manage in Outlook, or it could be a blog you start on industry topics of interest to your contacts. There are plenty of free blogging and newsletter platforms you can leverage. Blogger and MailChimp are good examples respectively.
As your audience grows, there will naturally be some segmentation among them. Take notes on the situation in which you go to know a contact and keep that with your contact info, such as in the Notes field of a VCard.
When you create your email list (for example) you can create specific personal distribution lists and categorize them accordingly.

Punch

If establishing your process is king, your content is queen. It has to have punch–meaning it has to 1) relevant, and 2) interesting. Your content can come from a lot of places. You yourself should be subscribed to a ton of blogs and feeds for fodder. Your company blog, press releases, and industry journals are great examples.
Two pieces of advice: Never copy verbatim long parts of articles (link to them instead), and always customize content to your audience as best you can. Personalization makes a huge difference in mass communication.
With the email list example, let’s say you are a security software vendor with health care accounts. Instead of just parroting what you just read on the latest piece of malware, briefly mention it’s ramifications to your customers, what you’ve seen in the field personally, and how it may uniquely impact the health care vertical.
Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll see what articles/information generates the most response. Refine your templates and content and then automate as much as possible.
Within two quarters you’ll be amazed how many people remember your name and mention the communication.

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Filed Under: Career Growth, Productivity, Sales, Soft Skills