Some baseball wisdom for modern-day marketers

Willie Keeler was one of the greatest hitters in Major League Baseball history. “Wee Willie,” as he was called, played during the turn of the century and racked up a .341 career batting average. His advice to other players about what it takes to swing a hot piece of lumber was this: “Hit ’em where they ain’t.”

“They” are the opposing defensive players. Keeler was legendary for hitting baseballs out of the reach of fielders. That same “hit ’em where they ain’t” strategy can be applied to many things in life – including sales and marketing.

Many sales and marketing tools have been abandoned as outdated or even old-fashioned in favor of the gold rush to social media, e-mail marketing, video production and a variety of other New Media tools.

If Willie Keeler were around today observing this mass migration he probably would have taken a contrarian stance, a hit-’em-where-they-ain’t approach. While marketers flood the internet’s social media, e-mail and video channels in a mad dash to be current, they have abandoned traditional channels that have a long history of efficacy.

Let’s deal with two of them in this article – direct mail using the U.S. Postal Service (and other mail and package deliverers) and telephone cold calling. Both have earned companies billions of dollars in sales over the decades. Both are under-used these days.

Take direct mail, pejoratively referred to as “junk mail.” Notice how the volume of direct mail has declined as marketers turned to online delivery systems. That means fewer pieces of mail in the postal box, fewer voices in the choir, a better opportunity to stand out.

Yes, surface mail is expensive, especially if you’re going to create well-designed pieces that have the greatest prospect of generating sales. But what is grabbing market share worth to your business? Buy some terrific guidance, such as the Herschell Gordon Lewis book Sales Letters That Sizzle .

Cold calling is another marketing tool fast being abandoned. Steve Richard, co-founder and head of sales at B2B consulting firm Vorsight, wrote an interesting piece for a Harvard Business Review blog that proclaimed that the cold call is not only alive, it’s still putting up big numbers.

“And it should be utilized by every B2B sales force,” Richard wrote in his blog posting. “I see far too many sales teams focus all their attention toward hosting fancy webinars or creating snazzy web-based marketing channels. Still, cold calling remains the most effective way to set up appointments with the right decision makers at your target accounts.”

By way of example, Richard pointed to a Fortune 50 telecom company that hired his firm to teach cold-calling techniques to its sales force. The result was a 10 percent spike in revenue. He says other clients have experienced comparable results.

Richard even imparted some cold-calling tips:

• Get the direct line of the person that you are cold calling. This doubles the probability of the person answering the phone.
• Separate your cold calling into two activities: prospecting to find the right person, and call blitzing to get that person on the phone. I recommend prospecting during normal business hours (starting around 10-11:30 a.m.) when administrative assistants are in the office. Do your call blitzing during “call windows,” before 8:30 a.m. and after 5:30 p.m., when support staff is gone and executives are more likely to pick up ringing telephones. Some other great times to call are five minutes before the top of the hour, catching executives before their next conference call meetings.
• Know the difference between persistence and annoyance. Follow these rules of thumb to be professional while consistently reaching out to prospects. 1) Personalize each message. 2) Vary the medium by using an alternating combination of voicemails and emails. 3) Always add value with each subsequent touch.
• Utilize online resources. There are many new tools to help you out, including information sources like LinkedIn, Jigsaw, InsideView and ZoomInfo. With ConnectAndSell you can even outsource your dialing and block an hour to sit at your desk to only talk to live prospects when they get a “connect.”

There is every reason to diversify your sales and marketing campaign to New Media channels. Just don’t forsake traditional winners that might bear even more fruit today than they did in the pre-internet era. Now is your chance to stand out in the less traffic-heavy channels.

Surely “Wee Willie” Keeler would doff his cap to such notions.

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