Wrong Number Marketing

By Author: Jeffrey Solochek
Total Articles: 78
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Over the years it has gotten harder and harder to find new effective ways to market your wares. With direct mail you may be lucky enough to get maybe a quarter of a percent positive response. If you use a little creativity and send a postcard with a picture of someplace like Hawaii and a message that looks hand written then maybe you'll get a 2 or 3 percent positive response. Blanket an entire zip code, sending out thousands of these post cards to maybe get 2 or 3 sales.

Because of the Do Not Call list it has gotten almost impossible to make telemarketing calls anymore. So many people either have unlisted numbers or they are on the list that out of 1,000 people you may only be permitted to call maybe 100 or 200 of these people.Have you ever heard of a man named Joe Girrard? He started selling cars in the sixties yet he wasn't allowed to handle the floor traffic. Instead he would just call everybody in the phone book and tell them that their new Chevy was ready for delivery and then he would ask them if they'd like to go ahead and pick it up tonight or wait until tomorrow morning?.

Joe Girrard holds the record ...
... for selling the most cars in one year. Most dealerships are lucky if they sell that many cars in a year but here is a man that by himself sold that many cars year after year. Joe Girrard was one of the first that I ever heard used the technique of Wrong Number Marketing. With the great success that Joe Girrard had I have been totally surprised at how many few salespeople have ever tried using this technique.

I guarantee that I could call everybody in my local white pages and tell them that their Pizza was ready for pick up. None of those people would have ordered a pizza bur by the time I get off the phone with them 30 percent or more would be eating a hot pizza soon. The others would probably be eating the Garlic bread or chicken Wings that the local pizza place also had on their menu.

I worked at a local Pizza Hut last Christmas Season. I just needed to get out of the house and make a little extra additional income. I was totally shocked that the majority of people that they had answering their telephones only took orders for pizzas. When I was answering the phone I mentioned the Cheese Bread and the Chicken Wings and the variety of soft drinks we carried. Sales of these items increased so much when I was working there that the Manager actually told me that they used to hardly sell any of these other items until I started working for them. I would start a shift and they would maybe only have $200 in sales for the day but by the time I left those numbers were well over $3,000.

What Pizza Hut should have done was to create some sort of incentive for the people answering the phones that the higher their sales numbers the more they would earn. Most businesses these days have taken away almost all commissions which I think is one of the biggest mistakes. Employees need some sort of incentive to produce greater sales numbers for the places where they work.

Marketing in the 21st century is still possible but now we may have to be a little more creative that we used to in the past. I used to shoot plates on Sundays during a time when I was in car sales. shooting plates is the process of writing down their plate numbers of visitors to the lot on Sundays. These people are probably going to be buying a car within the next 72 hours. In order to shoot plates you need a way to look up the peoples info from the plates on their cars but I used to sell 7 or 8 cars a week doing this.