How to be Persistent Without Being Pushy

As you can probably tell, my preferred method for staying in touch with existing and prospective clients is my weekly email newsletter. Before technology made this electronic newsletter possible, I had to print and post anything I wanted to share with existing and potential clients. Sending it via email offers a great deal in terms of cost, convenience and speed of communication.

But I feel it's important to remind you that the value of a newsletter like this is NOT the technology or the specific form it takes, but what it represents as a relationship building tool between you and your target audience.

Well before the advent of the web, the most successful salespeople were employing relationship building tools that gently kept putting their name in front of prospective clients and customers, and helped them to build trust and rapport.

'Planting Seeds' with your prospects

For example, marketing legend Joseph Sugarman shares an example of an insurance salesman who every once in a while would send him a relevant newspaper clipping or article with his card. Occasionally he would bring them in person, and at the end of his visit would remind him 'Joe, you really should buy insurance.'

This went on for several months, until the day Joe's next door neighbour - who was in his 40s - unexpectedly died of a massive heart attack. Joe was 36 at the time. The very next day he called that insurance salesman to make an appointment.

In his words: 'I had finally made the plunge. Was it Howard's salesmanship? Was it his persistence? Maybe. But Howard succeeded because he had planted enough seeds in my mind.'

So the value of a newsletter like this one, is it makes it possible for you to keep 'planting seeds' until such time that your prospect's need moves from 'I'll get around to it sometime' to 'I need to do something RIGHT NOW!

The advantage of 'one-to-many' versus 'one-to-one'

But besides that, a newsletter like this has a powerful hidden advantage in that it enables you to leverage your marketing efforts. That's because it's what I describe as a 'one-to-many' prospecting tool rather than a 'one-to-one' tool.

For example, it takes me the same hour to write this newsletter each week whether it's read by 100 people, 1000 people or 10,000 people. And that's what gives you the edge over a newspaper clipping insurance salesman!

If you're prospecting 'one-to-one' as he was, there is a finite number of people that you can reach each week before you run out of time. But with a newsletter like this, you do the same amount of work however many people are reading. So whereas the insurance salesman needed time to 'plant seeds', you can turbo-charge your seed planting - and then it's only a matter of time before your results flourish!

If you aren't already publishing a newsletter, don't delay another day. It's never too soon to get started.

When you in place a 'keep in touch' system for communicating with your existing and prospective clients you will dramatically transform your marketing results - so is definitely worth making time for.

Would you like to use this article on your website or in your e-zine? Reprints are welcome so long as article and by-line are published intact and all links made live.

About The Author:

Bernadette Doyle publishes her weekly Client Magnets newsletter for trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants, complementary therapists and solo professionals. If you want to get clients calling you instead of you calling them, then sign up for her weekly e-zine now at http://www.clientmagnets.com