How to convert your interruptive marketing strategy into permission marketing

I have talked about interruptive marketing recently.  It is really irritating to communicate with someone whom you don’t know while that someone tries to be familiar with you.  When I saw a known company selling marketing database where you can choose different age group, different company positions, etc, it got me into thinking how interrupting this company can be by “educating” their clients that it is ok to interrupt.

Different types of interruptive marketing

I can understand that they are trying to establish their sales here.  They are trying to do all sorts of approach that they can think of to hit that jackpot of cash.  But the inability to understand interuptive marketing can really keep your morale really low because you can only get your work completed once for every 10 attempts that you make!  It’s like gambling here!

There are different types of interruptive marketing:

1. Cold calling on our phones
2. Spamming our email addresses
3. Throwing brochures into our houses
4. Cold approaching us in the street
5. Referral cold approach (asking friends to refer, in the end their friends got scolded…)

A friend of mine showed me a URL which I think it is interesting to show all of you.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html 

This is a telephone script which counter-attacks telemarketeers.

We all know that most telemarketeers have a telephone script behind to follow on.  If the prospect answers Yes, what should the telemarketeer say? If No, what should the telemarketeer do? It’s all inside their scripts.

Found this script is a little more humorous than to use it actually.

My experience is that I ever asked back the telemarketeer how he or she got my number.  The standard answer is that they got it from a list which they cannot say.  And my standard answer is that I cannot say what they want to know either.  It’s really irritating to hear from these people.

Interruptive marketing does work at times

Of course, there are times when I am really interested.

I don’t mean that interruptive marketing don’t work. 

To a certain extend, every permission marketing actually starts with an interruptive marketing.  But it always starts with a 2-time approach instead of a direct approach.

(Ok, let me try to explain in a story below of how interruptive marketing turns into permission marketing…  There was once I got ridiculed for trying to explain this analogy which I ended up unable to.  haha)

Story of how Interruptive marketing turns into permission marketing

When a boy is interested in a girl he don’t know, he can choose two ways:

1. He can ask the girl to be his girlfriend immediately if she agrees.
2. He can talk to the girl first, and slowly get her interested.  That’s called “chasing”, “wooing”, etc.

Approach 1: My analogy here is that most interruptive companies like to use the first approach where they are playing a “number game” here.  For every 100 girls that he asked, there might be 1 girl who is interested to be his girlfriend.  We don’t say that the chance is a no, but it is just a very low chance.  But that’s exactly how many interruptive marketing companies actually approached!  They just spent enough money packaging themselves on the outside such as hair, clothes, shoes, watch, etc.  Then, they will simply go out there whacking with whatever that they have, till they hit their sales target!  So what happens after that?  They will usually have  no time to entertain their existing customers because they are busy with new prospects.

Approach 2: If this interruptive company is willing to sit down with one potential prospect, talking to her, drinking with her, and enjoying the moments with her.  Then get her number slowly.  Sms with her, chatting with her on the phone.  And going out for dates.  And the moment comes when he pops up the question… This is where I think permission marketing is correctly done!  Isn’t that a wonderful thing?

Approach 1 will only create unsatisfied customers.  Approach 2 will create happy customers.  Customers do change over the time.  Companies need to listen to them, instead of going out there to look for new ones trying to understand what they want.

Ok enough said.  Let’s take a look below to further explain a little bit here.

Conclusion

I hope I have been able to explain that analogy better this time.  With the video above that simply tells a lot about our consumer change and with so much information bomboarding us, the best approach today is to retain and to listen to our prospects.  Forget about the number game… Go and build a relationship with your customers.  Understand them and make them happy!  That’s all I have to say.  Take care guys and girls!  :)

Photo Credit: markhillary