Tough Markets Require Inches

Where do you find them?

When I was at Quicken Loans (nearly 20 years ago now - it wasn’t Rocket back then), one of my favorite ISMs was: “The inches we need are everywhere around us.”

You should make this your daily mantra in this market.

Photo by Simon Fitall on Unsplash

Swinging for the fences isn’t going to get it done. The CFO has cut your marketing budget and reduced your sales team.

But the CEO’s expectations haven’t changed.

Beating up your vendors, lead providers, marketing team, and sales agents won’t ease the pain. It’ll just make everyone hopeless and surly.

So, where are the inches?

1. Evaluate every marketing channel - what generates the deals you are closing today? Optimize your campaigns for middle funnel traffic. Sort and filter for people trying to figure out a problem you solve.

2. Give them content they can take away and share - No one makes a buying decision alone. A consumer (B2C) has to convince a spouse or partner. An executive or director (B2B) has to convince the committee or board. Give them something they can forward or send that makes their internal pitch easy – give them the deck or whitepaper. 

3. Watch contact rates - sales operations have to own this metric, not marketing. Conduct an audit (secret shop) of your customer’s journey. Make sure there is no friction in the lead-to-contact path. Special note: Check your phone numbers! I guarantee you are suffering some carrier blocking. Start leveraging text messages and email for higher initial contact rates.

4. Learn and build out sales and marketing automation - use technology to scale your prospecting and outreach. Cover more market with less effort. Learn to use your CRM or get drip email campaign software, and set up sales cadences using automated emails and text messages. Start simple. Add complexity and increase segmentation and personalization later. New, relevant sales cadences should trigger automatically as you move prospects into a new status. I use Pipedrive + MailShake.

5. Campaign against your database - segment, if you can, but don’t delay starting campaigns against your past client and aged lead database. Focus on market updates and education, not getting a deal.

6. Become a trusted analyst - tell people what is happening and where the opportunities are in this market. Take out the fear and build your customer’s confidence with transparency and education. 

One more tip to gain a few inches:

Kill the fear. Educate/work yourself into secure ownership of your situation.

- Bill

Bonus Tip #1: Send emails linking to other websites and riff off their reporting. This is a great way to build trust and credibility and reduce the amount of content you have to produce. In the mortgage industry, CNBC is an everlasting spring of hype and drama that can use to grab a consumer’s attention.

Bonus Tip #2: Start with a text message: “I got your request, I’m on a call, but I’ll call you in 20 minutes — unless there is a better time for you.” Don’t start with a phone call; no one wants or will answer a cold call. Even if they fill out a web form — they don’t want to be called first. They want an immediate email or text message to acknowledge their inquiry and control their schedule. Let them have that control!

Bonus Tip #3: Don’t send inbound calls into an IVR!!! We see between 20-30% abandonment after 10 seconds. No one wants to hit automation anymore.