When starting a business or rolling out a new product or service, every entrepreneur faces the dilemma of ‘feeding the funnel.’ I’m sure you feel that you’ve got an A-game when it comes to closing the deal, but how you actually get in front of decision makers in the first place is a majority of the battle. You may have a great product or service, but if you don’t have people showing interest, you might as well not have a business at all. Generating initial interest is the name of the game when it comes to email marketing. Closing the deal is something else entirely. If sending out cold emails scares you, this article should help calm your nerves a bit. It may not bring you hordes of customers with wallets in-hand, but it will bring you interested prospects.
Prospecting Methods
There are several different ways to generate interest. You could go door-to-door if your service has a mass appeal, meaning that if any everyday person could benefit from your product then getting out there and knocking on some doors could drum up one or two sales on the spot every day that you put on your ‘work boots.’
Telemarketing can definitely be an effective means of prospecting as well. Newer startups may lack the capital to invest in a proper phone sales force. Let me say this though, it’s a lot easier to do a follow-up phone call after someone has shown interest from an initial email.
Cold emails aren’t meant to close someone on your product or service. They are meant to sift through all of the people in a leads list to find the ones that are open to discussion. Sure, the sales cycle might be a little longer, but I’m sure you would rather speak to someone over the phone that is interested right off of the bat than speaking to someone who is not interested at all, right?
Referral marketing can also be a great way to feed your sales funnel. By giving your current customers/clients the best service possible and really adding value to their business will help imprint your brand across their network of business owners (b2b) or neighbors (b2c). Referral marketing can take a while to achieve any real results, so when you need instant cash flow, it may not be the go-to solution.
