Gatekeepers!

If you sell big ticket items or sell to large businesses, you’ll have come across the problem of gatekeepers.  These are the well meaning PA’s and secretaries that are employed to help their senior managers (your targets/decision makers) with their workload; this often involves opening their post and determining which letters they should pass over to these managers!

Quite often, sales letters are not often passed to these decision makers, so you never hear anything from them again, but here are two techniques that we have successfully used in the past to help clients get your message to their intended target.

  1. Before you send your target the proper sales letter, send their PA/Secretary a letter first (with maybe a small box of chocolates) explaining that you’ll be sending their boss a letter in a few days or so and you would appreciate it if they received it!  This was used by a telecoms company we worked with and they received a 85%+ success rate in contacting the decision maker.
  2. On another occasion we needed to send out an invite for an event for a client, once we had written the invite we sent them out in tubes!  The strange packaging worked, and got the attention they needed, receiving another high response rate.

Whatever you try, we hope it works for you too.