You may be very comfortable with your sales efforts but are they generating the results that you want? In order to Clear the Path of diminishing returns, you may need to throw out your current model for connecting with your customers.
For instance, I’m a member of several airline mileage clubs and I frequently receive emails from them. These emails are almost always the same. The airline is either promoting its credit card or telling me about discount fares that rarely apply to my backyard.
I either scan the message for 1.8 seconds or delete without reading. One of these days I’ll get around to unsubscribing.
I imagine that somewhere a marketing executive will swear that these emails are pure gold and they should continue to be sent out on a regular basis.
On the other hand, Albert Einstein described insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
The airlines have yet to ever try to personalize its messages to me, beyond inserting my name. After all, they know where I live and where I’ve flown in the past. You would think that information could be used to make a more appealing sales pitch. Instead they send me the same message that goes out to every other customer. Does this make sense?
My cable TV provider, Comcast, likes to send me letters that promote its services. The funny thing is that I’m already subscribed to most of the services it’s promoting. Comcast must really want me to know about them because it sends two copies of the same letter to my address. One is for me and the other is for the previous owner, who has been gone for 6+ years.
Again, there’s no attempt to relate the pitch to my buying patterns or suggest additional services that could fit my needs. Instead, I get a cookie cutter.
You can stay very busy sending out cookie cutter messages and recycling them frequently. It can feel comfortable to do the same things again and again. But don’t expect your results to break the mold.
