A particularly important business-to-business communication of interest to Brockmann & Company is the so-called ‘first contact’. Like the Paramount Pictures film of the same name, the first time a prospective buyer reaches out and contacts a vendor is particularly important because it represents an opportunity to influence, opportunity to sell and opportunity to be judged by the most important person in a potential business-to-business interaction, the customer. First contacts in this direction are many times more valuable to business because the prospect has already self-qualified themselves and are predisposed to a sales-oriented discussion.
Brockmann & Company results in the report, First Contact: Using Email to Win Customers More Often show that:
- Human accessibility on the website is important to buyers since it increases brand perceptions for 83% of buyers. It is recommended that webmasters should enable ‘open contact’ for sales and support professionals or executives. Open contact is the process of posting the name, email and telephone number of actual sales, executive or support personnel on the company website. This greatly improves the buyers’ perception of the vendors’ brands.
- Unsolicited tele-marketing has greater responsiveness rates than unsolicited email or leaving voicemail.
- A vendor using challenge-response technology has a more positive brand impression than a vendor catching customers’ email in spam filters, or a vendor that ignores first contacts altogether.
