Marketing to business prospects.

• Author: Turner, Jim
• Position: Direct Mail Essentials

Selling financial services to business prospects is always best done face-to-face. But it's not practical to have your calling officers sell every service in person.

Here's where direct mail can be a great investment. A sales letter will never replace a calling officer, but it can make the officer more effective and bring you business. Take the example of a $500 million bank that has 3,000 qualified business prospects in its market.

Its staff would take months, or years, to visit all 3,000. But they can be reached in a few days by mailing a letter, postcard or promotional flier for a cost of $1,500 to $3,000, a fraction of the cost of using bank staff. And, a bank might do this four or five times a year, making 12,000 to 15,000 impressions, a costly and virtually impossible task for the calling staff.

A direct mail campaign can not only inform your prospect of your services (an advertisement) but also "close" the sale (through direct response). Here's a range of ways you can use direct mail to market everything from business checking to commercial loans.

1. Providing Information. If you're introducing a new service, perhaps a new cash management system, direct mail can tell your customers and prospects about it in just a few days. That gives your calling staff a real advantage when they actually make the sales call. Here, direct mail serves simply as highly targeted advertising.

2. Generating on inquiry. Instead of personally calling on every prospect, you can identify who wants more information on a specific service by using a business mailer and reply card. With today's low interest rates, for example, you can advertise commercial real estate or equipment loans with a rate and term likely to generate a strong response. Include a business reply card listing checkboxes for all your major products so the respondent can inquire easily. Providing a direct reply telephone number is a good idea, too, as telephone inquiries usually come from highly interested individuals.

3. Getting an appointment. Offering a free, no-obligation meeting in the prospect's office can be effective. Be sure to include sufficient details on the service to interest the reader and to describe how they will benefit or what they will learn from a meeting.

4. Closing the sale. This also can be an achievable objective for direct mail. For example, if you are...