Are your prospects rejecting you or forgetting you?
Conventional marketing wisdom may lead you to believe that your offer is being rejected, but if you are a niche agency servicing local service businesses, our data suggests that your offer is being forgotten and…
That should change EVERYTHING about your long term follow up.
Before I dive into that, I should address a question you are likely to have:
How is it that the CEO of a White-Label PPC/SEO fulfillment company has insight into end clients when InvisiblePPC never communicates with them?
I don’t have that insight as the CEO of InvisiblePPC. But I do as the CEO of True Blue Collar, a niche agency servicing local contractors (plumbers, HVAC, electricians, etc.) that we founded about 6 months ago. So far we have about $40K in MRR, but it’s been a learning experience getting there.
And whether prospects are rejecting or forgetting you is an initial miscue that is developing into a triumph for us.
Here is the traditional Buyer’s Journey.
Typically, agencies are first seeing clients in the Consideration stage. In our case at True Blue Collar, they were answering our Facebook ads and we were having great success with the ads. We were killing the Consideration stage.
Yet we were failing to get them to decide to work with us.
Actually, we were failing to even get them into sales calls.
They were ghosting us
And here is where our initial miscue happened.
We made the assumption that by ghosting us, our prospects were indicating:
I mean that makes sense. Say you’re in the market to buy a car. You visit different dealerships and you choose the one that has the car that works best for you. One dealership wins and the rest lose.
We assumed we had lost.
And we were wrong.
I’d love to tell you we caught our own mistake, but it was our “ghosts” who let us know.
What happened was that about 90 days after a prospect ghosted us, they were answering our ads again.
They hadn’t made a decision yet.
They weren’t car buyers.
They were dieters, LOL.
See most people who start a diet, don’t follow a straight path on their weight loss journey. There tends to be much starting and stopping, and it usually takes a crisis for them to get them fully committed to dieting.
Our contractors who ghosted us were dieters.
They knew that they had a problem (not enough calls, consistent calls, etc.) but they weren’t in crisis mode. They might be in warm water which is why they were answering the ad, but their problems hadn’t boiled over so they weren’t taking the next steps.
Thankfully, our ads were catching some of these ghosts, but we knew that we needed to change our long term follow up process, a weekly newsletter & quarterly email, to catch more of them.
And here is where our triumph occurred.
We knew that every one who answered our ads had some sort of problem. But what we didn’t know is whether they were in crisis mode. Granted, some may never reach that point, but it seemed a safe bet that most would. And we wanted to be there when they did.
So we decided to add a weekly “pain point” email to our long term follow up.
And to date, it has been very successful for us.
We realize that we won’t be a fit for every plumber or HVAC owner that interviews with us, but by following up and actively probing, we limit losing those good fits when they are ready to move forward.
