Over a 4-month period, Tom Andrulis, CEO of Intelligent Technical Solutions, exploded his business.
Sending just five letters to a small list, he closed over $24,000 per month of recurring revenue and $45,238 in project revenue. This made a significant difference in his business, contributing $774,096 in revenue to his bottom line. Not only was the money good, but the clients were also better people.
This method had clients calling him within three months of sending the first letter. The clients are larger, landing even just one of them makes a significant difference. Prospects love what they receive. Some even held onto these letters and called Andrulis up to a year later.
What is the secret behind working with more enjoyable clients and making a lot more money?
A Dream 100 Campaign
A Dream 100 Campaign targets your top 100 dream clients. These are the clients who you’d walk over glass to land. The type of prospects that even if you only landed one of them, it could majorly impact the trajectory of your company and change your company’s existence.
While theoretically, you don’t need exactly 100 prospects on this list, you do want to aim for approximately that number. In other words, a list in the high eighties to low one hundred is acceptable. Too few prospects on the list and you won’t get the response you want. Too many on the list and you’ll find it is too difficult to follow up with them all.
The Five Steps To Running Your Own Dream 100 Campaign
Step one: Figure out who your top 100 prospects are. What are your criteria for your Dream 100? You’ll want to give this a lot of thought to make sure you are targeting the companies that can truly impact your business while at the same time being people you enjoy. A few things you might consider in determining who makes your list are:
- location of the company
- type of company
- the number of IT users
- whether the company has IT staff or outsources IT
Step two: Call all the prospects on your list. Once you determine who the ideal prospect is for your list, you’ll need to find them and get their contact information, including their address. Calling is the best way to do this. The goal of the call is two-fold: 1) To determine which of your prospects match your Dream 100 criteria and 2) To gather the names and contact information for your Dream 100.
While tedious, this is critical to the success of your campaign. The good news is, once you call all the companies on your list, you’ll have a lot more clarity about who you want to do business with and who your ideal client is.
When Andrulis created his Dream 100 list, he started with a list of 13,000 companies pulled from different resources. He called every company to get a profile of who they were and find out the contact person in charge of making IT decisions.
When someone met the Dream100 criteria, the prospect was tagged. In the end, 87 of the 13,000 were an ideal match for his Dream 100 list. (Others that matched some of the criteria but not all were added to another list, just not the Dream 100 list.)
Tips:
- Consider outsourcing the calls to clean your list. Outsourcing can make it less expensive and get the job done faster than trying to do it in house. Plus, because it doesn’t require the same skill set as sales, you’ll get better results and be able to utilize your in-house salespeople more effectively by having them focus on closing sales.
- Don’t skip this step! While time-consuming, cleaning your list, and keeping the contact information up to date is important to make sure you are sending the campaign to the right person. Bad data makes a Dream 100 campaign fail.
Step three: Create a campaign that will draw attention. Remember that your campaign is going to a list of prospects that can make a substantial difference in your business. You want something interesting that will get noticed, so plan on spending more on these campaigns than you normally would.
Lumpy mail, mail which contains an object, is ideal for Dream 100 campaigns. Andrulis included items such as aspirin, nuts, and poker chips in his Dream 100 mailers. These lumpy packages stand out and create curiosity.
The mailer includes a short letter, no more than two pages long, and might also include testimonials. Your letter should use direct response writing to compel prospects to take action. This is how you’ll get Dream 100 prospectscalling you, instead of you having to chase them down.
Step four: Follow-up. After sending out your lumpy mail campaign, it’s important to follow up. This helps build the relationship, so they get to know, like, and trust you and therefore want to do business with you. Let your salespeople know who is on your Dream 100 list and that they are your high-value, best prospects. Your salespeople will want to build their own relationship, so it’s a good idea for them to contact the prospect to introduce themselves, leave a business card, send thank you cards, send direct mail, and even bring a small gift to the business such as donuts.
Step five: Aggressively market to your Dream 100 list. Continue to send a different lumpy mail campaign and follow up every month. This consistency will help your Dream 100 get to know who you are and build trust. While some offers will repeat, you’ll want to vary the offers, so they aren’t receiving the same offer every month.
Start building your Dream 100 list today. Once you’ve accumulated around 100 of your ideal, high-value targets, get your first campaign in the mail, and add your Dream 100 campaign to your 12-month marketing calendar to ensure you are consistently contacting them. Keep your list up to date as your list can degrade 2% or more per month. And lastly, stick with it. While it may take several months to land your first Dream 100 client, it’s worth it because it doesn’t take many of these Dream 100 clients to make an enormous difference in your bottom line.
If you want a FREE step-by-step plan to consistently and predictably attract more high-quality clients for your IT services business…and put the entire system on auto-pilot, click here now.
