The first week in January Luke and I started a pretty intense and involved prospecting campaign. We created compelling, targeted marketing materials and started knocking on doors of local businesses with 401k plans. We went out every week without fail. After the marketing was created our process was pretty straight forward. We would look up as much info as we could on the company and the person we wanted to make contact with. Armed with all the knowledge we could find we hand delivered the marketing package and asked for our target person.

After we made the deliveries we would make follow up calls later in the week. Our goal for the call was to…

1. Confirm they received the package.
2. See if they had questions.
3. Set up a meeting to come in and talk with them more in depth.

After the call, If we didn’t get a meeting with them, our process pretty much stopped. We were unsuccessful and we moved on to the next prospect.

Luke and I walked into about 120 businesses in January. From that effort we got a few meetings set and were happy with the progress. We had planned to continue that process for the rest of the year and we calculated that we would end up with a pretty good year of production.

However, that’s not how the real world works and our plans changed. As we both learn more about the workings of our firm we quickly found out that we needed to have a unified front in the marketing and sales departments. Our firm had recently begun to work with Hubspot. They adhere to a radically different style of marketing than the world is used to. The profession of sales is changing and we needed to get educated quickly.

We were intrigued and dove right in. Hubspot was an eye opener. The concepts we were learning matched up almost exactly with the ideas we had regarding how we wanted to personally conduct our sales and marketing. The only difference was Hubspot is in the big leagues and we were still playing coach pitch.

Once we became aware of how much we didn’t know we took a step back with our original marketing efforts. We decided to spend an extremely focused week reevaluating our sales process. We needed to make changes that more closely mirrored Hubspot’s philosophies, as well as integrate our efforts with the inbound marketing. We had to drive our target market to the website. So, we created an 8 step sales process that totally changes what we had been doing before. We are now going to go through doors with a completely different mindset and goals. We are no longer going to be just another salesman. We are going to be a useful resource for our prospects to utilize and engage us when they are ready.

There have of course been setbacks. We originally planned to be off the road for only 3-4 weeks max. We found out again how much we don’t know about the industry. The compliance protocol for marketing materials that go out to prospects is a huge process. A process that takes time to get right. So, we had to work at a pace that was much slower than we anticipated. Our time off the road extended to 3 months and we were starting to get a little discouraged. However, we keep taking steps forward. We stayed productive and we accomplished many other projects during that time, but the prospecting was always in the back of our minds. We needed to get back out there.

The good news is, that time has come. We are now approved for all marketing materials and processes. We are going to be knocking on doors again this week and every week for the rest of the year. We will build that pipeline and stuff it full of prospects.

It’s time to focus up and go get it. We will let you know how it goes.

Chris