posted by dnbrokership:
Pick up the phone... DO NOT use email. Use thomas guide to find end users, local businesses so you go in person to speak with them. Can't sell to end-users with email and from your desk chair. Does not work.
Setting aside the relatively low quality of leads one can get out of Thomas or a similar guide, the "live sales force" approach has so many limitations that it's hard to grasp how it can be viable for anyone not living in a sizable metro area and in possession of a high-margin domain portfolio. Specifically, I'm working with profit margins of $200-$800 per domain. It's just not a "live sales force" kind of margin. I was "live selling" for that kind of commission in my twenties, more years ago than I'd care to consider. This just winds back around to my earlier post about time management. I hate to put it quite like this, but busting your ass for a few hundred bucks is for poor people.
I do almost all of my prospect contacts via e-mail. The effifacy of e-mail is a big concern of mine, because I know without a doubt that many possibly-interested prospects never even get a chance to discard my e-mails, let alone read them, thanks to automated spam filtering. However, this can also true of mailed letters, voice mails, etc. (filtered through departments, assistants and so on) and the time spent playing grabass with the receptionst or switchboard while you attempt to get in touch with the actual person with whom you need to speak at a company can be collosal.
With regards to lead quality, looking up end users by industry greatly broadens the target net, without adding anything to the quality of any given lead (ie. you still have to go through those to wring out the good ones.) I'll take the 10-30 quality,
qualified leads that I can get with a minor amount of effort using search engines, whois and various other sources over a long list of potentials that I have to spend time tracking down and with whom I have to have a "handshake" conversation, which shackles me to the prospect's time zone and work schedule, and adds work to the prospecting process, without adding any measurable quality to the lead.
If I were dealing in higher-value domains, then this extra layer of work might be worth doing, or at least outsourcing; however, at my particular rung on the ladder it just isn't worth it.
I will say that I have found mail-outs to be useful when dealing with large domain portfolio holders, but only have a handful of these in my contact database (specifically, I mean non-domainer holders of at least 100 non-branded domain names.) For these I group the better domains which apply to the prospect's portfolio and put together a 3-5 page presentation on search and trend metrics which pertain to the industry in general and domains in particular -- trying to educate anyone on his own business is a laughable effort, since whether he knows anything or nothing, he thinks he knows everything -- but the information on his business
through the lens of search engines and other online information aggregators is something he likely has not seen explained in detail, and the compelling nature of this information adds value by association to the names being pitched. But these buyers are -- so far -- few and far between, so while I've had success with it, I haven't had enough success or failure to know if it's a meaningful sample (specifically, six mailouts have resulted in five sales to four buyers, all for pretty decent prices. That looks awesome on paper, but it's six mailouts -- could just have gotten lucky, you know?)
Frank
