Just sharing a little love...

Our Nurture Marketing Writer's Guild is an ongoing support system where we learn from industry experts, and each other, to consistently keep up-to-date on the latest techniques, styles and solve challenges. Recently, we were thrilled to speak with Dr. Tom Sant and gain some awesome insight. We thought we would share his kind words about our managing partner, Jim Cecil, and the concept of nurture marketing. Thanks Dr. Sant!

From Dr. Tom Sant:

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of having a virtual conversation with members of the Nurture Writing Guild. Inspired and led by Jim Cecil, who has been one of my favorite people for more years than either he or I care to remember, the Guild consists of professional freelance writers who create effective nurture messages for clients.

The whole concept of nurture marketing is one that I strongly believe in. And Jim Cecil is the leading exponent of that approach to business development.

The concept is simple: stay in contact with your customers and your prospects. Send them messages, news items, personal notes, tips, and whatever else you think they might find interesting or enjoyable. Do it regularly, say once every month to six weeks. Over time, people will feel more connected to you, they will have a sense of your competence, and they will think of you first if they need help in your area of expertise. Jim calls that maintaining "top-of-mind awareness" so that when they are ready to buy, they think of you first.

In The Giants of Sales, I wrote about Joe Girard, the "world's greatest salesman," according to the Guinness Book of World Records, who used a variation of nurture marketing to sell Chevrolets.  He sold over 13,000 cars in 12 years, working as a solo sales guy on the floor of a Chevrolet dealership in Detroit. All by himself, selling cars retail to individual buyers, Joe Girard sold more cars per year than 95% of all the dealerships in North America. 

So how did nurture marketing figure into his method? He realized that every person he met knew a couple of hundred other people, some of whom might be looking for a car. If he stayed in touch with all of those people he had met, reminding them he was out there, then when they or their friends, relatives or employees decided it was time to buy that new car, they'd think of Joe Girard first. 

Joe sold cars back in the days before e-mail, so he did the old-fashioned way: he sent out greeting cards. He was fierce about collecting names and mailing addresses from everyone he met, and once he had your contact data, he sent you a message every month. In fact, at his peak, he mailed over 13,000 cards a month. He kept the message simple and personal, and he never used his mailing list to try to directly sell anything. No special offers on oil changes or lube jobs.

For us, we have multiple media that we can use to nurture our contacts. How hard is it to send an e-mail with a link to an article? How tricky is it to send a note of congratulations when you see that someone had updated his or her LinkedIn profile with a new job? But very few people bother, even sales people who probably know better.

Recently I conducted a class for a major bank, working with a group of 30 high potential young managers. After it was over, I received three thank you notes.  Maybe only ten percent of the attendees thought the training was worthwhile, but I suspect that there were actually a few others who liked it but just didn’t bother to say "thanks". So which of these 30 do you think I'd recommend first?

Jim and his colleagues have recognized that writing a short, focused message that's interesting to read and not too self-serving or technical is hard. Lots of companies would like to use nurture marketing—even something very simple like Twitter—but just don't have the time or talent to pull it off.  So the Nurture Writing Guild has stepped up to fill that gap. 

You can learn more about nurture marketing here: www.nurturemarketing.com. And you can access some of Jim Cecil's wisdom at his blog:  http://nurturemarketingblog.com/. Jim's warm and funny and smart as can be. He's definitely somebody to read if you're involved in any kind of sales or marketing or business development role. 

To order the world's best-selling book on writing winning proposals, Persuasive Business Proposals, click here. For Dr. Tom's fascinating study of the origins of the most important ideas in professional sales and the individuals who first came up with them, The Giants of Sales, please click here. To improve your writing, take a look at Tom’s book, The Language of Success, which you can order here.