When you’re selling a complex, big-ticket product such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting software, with a sales cycle that’s measured in months rather than days, you have to find a way to remain in contact with your prospects over the long term. What’s more, that continual contact has to entail more than calling them periodically to ask, “Are you ready to buy yet?”
For Pleasant Valley Business Solutions (PVBS), a monthly e-newsletter has been key to staying in touch with prospective and current customers. But “High-Growth Government Contractor News” provides only a bare minimum of information about PVBS’s wares. In fact, the bulk of the content is written not by PVBS but by its “partners”—other companies that, like PVBS, sell to government contractors.
Each issue opens with a letter from PVBS CEO Bernard Mustafa, followed by three or four service or news articles of interest to government contractors. The January issue, for instance, included articles on contract management, hiring compliance staff, and understanding warranties in acquisition agreements, all of them written by outside experts in the field. The logos of the contributors’ companies are given as much prominence in the e-newsletter as that of PVBS.
Nonetheless, the newsletter has been “very valuable to the sales process” for PVBS, says Fred Diamond, principal of Diamond Marketing, a consultancy specializing in high-tech and professional-services firms. As PVBS’s marketing consultant, he works with the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, Paul Skurpski.
“The e-mail newsletter gives our field sales reps a way to touch the customer and remind them of us for when they are ready to move ahead with procuring our software,” Diamond explains. “We also solicit articles from partners, so it reminds them that we are very focused on the needs of government contractors. These partners—accounting firms and other companies that provide services to government contractors—are a big source of leads for us. Thirdly, the newsletter reminds the community that PVBS is singularly focused on the needs of government contractors.”
PVBS’s e-newsletter had its genesis in 2006, when the company built a database of government contractors within 100 miles of Washington, DC, and Virginia Beach, VA, “where more than 70% of the government contracting activity happens,” according to Diamond. “Once we built the database, we implemented programs to communicate to these companies, typically CFO and COOs there. We subscribed to [e-mail solutions provider] Constant Contact and built a newsletter that had some PVBS information but mostly articles submitted by our partners that would be of interest to financial management at these firms.”
Today the e-newsletter is sent to 2,500 subscribers, all of whom have double opted-in. Roughly 80% are prospects and customers, 15% partners, and the remainder “friends and networking associates,” Diamond says. The sales team continually adds anywhere from 5-30 prospects to the file each month.
While, say, an apparel retailer can gauge the effectiveness of a marketing e-mail in large part by how many sweaters were sold to customers who clicked through, sellers of so-called considered purchases such as enterprise software don’t have that luxury. For PVBS it’s more a matter of measuring recipients’ engagement. “We look at simple metrics such as opens and click-throughs, and who specifically clicked on an article. We measure activity such as how many people click through on offers such as for a new white paper or seminar registration,” Diamond says. “Comments from the audience are also appreciated, such as an e-mail to a rep saying that they want more information.”
Despite the meatiness of the newsletter’s content, Diamond says putting it together is not very labor-intensive. He spends about a half-day each month soliciting articles from outside companies, “which is not difficult, since many companies are writing articles to gain attention in this space,” and the PVBS newsletter gives them access to a new but still relevant audience. Diamond then spends another half-day actually putting the content into the newsletter template.
Nor, despite what one might suspect, does Diamond have to spend a lot of time deflecting management demands for harder-selling copy. PVBS realized from the get-go that filling its newsletter with verbiage devoted to touting the benefits of its offering would likely turn off readers rather than engage them with the company.
“The company management was committed to positioning PVBS as a valued part of the community from day one,” Diamond says. “They also like when people comment that they are getting the newsletter and like it.”
