Reluctance To Experiment: All Too Common in Fortune 500 Sales Organizations 

Following the herd —also known as lock-stepping though daily Fortune 500 sales organization  life — is all too common.
Have an idea for improving how your corporate sales organization interacts with customers?

Want to test a different way of getting and keeping customers?
Sorry, but without top management support and attention even the smallest Fortune 500 sales development experiments go nowhere.
This reluctance to experiment has become epidemic and may already have taken hold of your sales organization.

To buck this trend try these tested direct marketing tips

They are simple, straightforward and easy to implement — but they work.

Put them to work and you will get more out of every sales dollar you spend.

•  Advertising Campaigns: “Almost any advertising question can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them — not by arguments around a table.

• Salesmanship: “Advertising is salesmanship. Treat it like a salesman. Force it to justify itself.”[singlepic id=1 w=320 h=240 float=right]

• Good Business: “…most national advertising is done without justification. It is merely presumed to pay. A little test might show a way to multiply returns.”

• Things Too Costly: “Many things are possible in advertising which are too costly to attempt. That is another reason why every project and method should be weighed and determined by a known scale of cost and result.”

• Letter Writing; “Letters to inquirers, follow-up letters, whenever possible they should be tested. Where that is not possible they should be based on knowledge based on tests.”

• Offer Service:”Remember the people you address are selfish, as we all are. They care nothing about your interests or your profit. They seek service for themselves. Ignoring this fact is a common mistake and a costly mistake in advertising.”

Get Tested Direct Marketing Updates

Get updates on ways Tested Direct Marketing can help your Fortune 500 sales development organization  —especially in this economy.

Also, go here for DMA 2012 response rate reports for lead generation marketing media. Plus this Advertising Age update on B2B phone marketing.

Also, for further study:

• Harvard Business Review On Cold Call Sales Prospecting
• 7 New Rules for Prospecting In The Age of The Customer
•  Survey of best media for  highest QUALITY sales lead generation.