There was a very popular old story by Herman Russell that went viral back in the early 1900’s. It was called Acres of Diamonds, and it was about a farmer who went on a long, harsh journey to find diamonds, only to find that he should have dug into his own back yard. His yard that was full of diamonds!
The story is still told today, as relevant as ever, as a lesson that teaches us to appreciate what we already have, rather than wasting time and energy on journeys, tactics, methods, etc. that don’t pay off.
Acres of Diamonds reminds me of a conversation I had with a broker. At the time, his goal was to generate more leads, but he already had a database of 2500 leads who had never been contacted!
That database of leads was like a field full of diamonds in his own back yard, just waiting to be discovered, mined and refined – the value immense.
So why didn’t the broker contact anyone in his database rather than launching new marketing campaigns to bring in new leads? The answer is that it would simply take too long – to figure out who to contact, what their new rate and savings could be, not to mention just creating the emails or making phone calls and trying to remember who is interested and following up appropriately. It was just frankly too much manual work to be worth his time.
Going through his customer database to figure whether they were “hot” leads would take someone up to an hour per record – that would have been 2500 hours of manual work!
Do you have this problem? Are your files overflowing with contacts that you’ve never contacted? Do you lack the tools and time to follow up with new contacts (or hot leads) who may be interested in getting a quote from you?
If this sounds like you, I have some good news for you: Marketing Automation is the solution to these and other marketing and sales follow up problems!
