The Rolling Ten Letter

The Rolling Ten Letter

"Breakthroughs come from an instinctive judgment of what customers might want if they knew to think about it." --Andrew Grove, Intel

Many people consider marketing to be promotion, advertising and all the selling techniques used to get someone to buy a product. However marketing is much more.

It’s important to understand that marketing is not the same thing as advertising, selling or promoting. Those are separate tasks. Advertising, selling and promoting are essentially the implementation of your marketing plan. That is, once you have identified your customer prospects and determined how best to reach and serve them, you then have to go out and make it happen.

A marketing approach to business begins with the customer’s needs and involves designing the entire business around fulfilling those needs through benefits.

One great need of small business managers is to understand and develop marketing programs for their products and services. Long term small business success depends on the ability to maintain a strong body of satisfied customers while continually increasing this body with new customers. Modern marketing programs build around the marketing concept, which directs managers to focus their efforts on identifying, satisfying, and following up the customer's needs - all at a profit.

The Rolling 10 as a Marketing PROGRAM

What is the Rolling 10?

It is a systematic approach to contacting a specific number of prospects, during predetermined timeframes and to follow-up effectively.

The Rolling 10 is based on the fact that every prospect needs to be contacted at least 4-8 times to establish your name recognition and to possibly make a sale.

There are two ways to construct a rolling 10 program.

Option 1 –Letters/Marketing Pieces with Phone Follow-up

Step 1 – Identify best prospects for your product or service.

Step 2 – Compile or buy a list that includes complete company data including the decision makers name.

Step 3 – Write 3-4 letters or marketing pieces that stress the key BENEFITS that a prospect can expect to receive from doing business with you.

Step 4 – Determine time frames:

That you can comfortably support for sending out 10 letters to prospects. A week is a timeframe that is most used.

That you can comfortably make phone follow-up. A week between letters and follow-up is a time frame that is most used.

That you will use to send each consecutive letter. 4-6 weeks is a time frame commonly used.

Step 5 – Begin sending letters at the rate of 10 per week.

Step 6 – One week after sending first letters begin making phone calls to follow-up on these letters.

The process then becomes automatic. Send ten letters and follow-up by phone on the letters that were sent the prior week. You will have ten NEW phone calls to make every week to NEW prospects and follow-up phone calls to prospects who might roll-over for some reason from week to another.

Step 7 – Send additional 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th letters or marketing pieces and repeat the follow-up process.

If you have contacted a prospect 4-8 times (a combination of letters and phone) and they have not responded or become a customer drop them from you list.