Connecting With Your Leads Using Campaign Cards

Notes from Team Call on February 5, 2007

Connecting With Your Leads Using Campaign Cards

Recording Playback Number: 641-985-5000
Access Code: 784665#

Follow up is the life-blood of our business. Even when we have prospects who LOVE SendOutCards, this does not ensure that they will follow up on their own to get an account. It’s very easy for them to put this on the back burner.

Some people are ready to sign up during the initial gift account walk through, and some people want time to think about it. If a prospect is certain they want some kind of an account, I encourage them to get what they KNOW they want, and then upgrade later. If they are not ready to decide, I do my best to set a follow-up date with them to answer any questions they have.

All that being said, some people are not ready to make a decision and don’t want to schedule a follow up call. If YOU don’t do something to keep them on your radar, they may slip through the cracks and never get around to setting up an account…or someone else may follow up with them when they are ready and you will miss the opportunity to sponsor them.

There are several ways you can follow up:

1. Phone call
2. Email
3. Face to face
4. Sending cards

Regardless of what your “next step” is, you need a good system in place to remind you to follow up. Some of us use electronic reminders in Outlook, ACT!, a Palm Pilot, etc. Some of us use paper reminders, such as a to-do list, a reminder handwritten on a calendar, or a handwritten message in the tickler file. Regardless of what you do, you need to find a way that works consistently for you. Next week we will be talking about this more, so tune in then.

Focus for this call: the use of campaign cards.

Last fall I assembled a group of about 40 team members -- we called ourselves the Campaign Development Team. We collectively created a number of campaign cards that were intended to share with each other. Tonight I am sharing access to these campaigns with you. Before I do so, I need to explain a few things:

1. Why we created the campaigns the way we did.
2. How you can access them.
3. Who you can share them with and how.

To begin, I need to explain how we can forward a campaign from one SOC account to another. When you access the Manage Campaigns link from your Card Manager Main Menu, you will see the names of all existing campaigns that were created in that user’s account. All distributor accounts come with one pre-created campaign called First Look. You will see the name of the campaign (First Look), followed by Edit, Remove, and Copy to User

When you click on Copy to User, you can then enter in the user ID number for ANY account in the SOC system. That includes your gift accounts. So if I have a prospect with a gift account ID of s192879, I simply enter that ID number into the Copy to User field and it will send the campaign to that gift account. If someone is sending a campaign to my account, they would enter my four-digit account ID number.

Once you have sent a campaign, it must be received by the owner of the account you sent it to. When you log into that account, at the bottom of the main menu it will say, “Someone has sent you a campaign. Click here to accept it.” Then this campaign is added to the campaigns in that account.

So here’s what you need to understand about the process: Campaigns can only be forwarded from the “owner account” for the campaign. In other words, if someone forwarded you a campaign, you cannot then forward it to someone else because your account did not create the original campaign. This is why our team created all campaigns in what we called Dummy Gift Accounts.

Once you create a Dummy Gift Account, you can give the user name and password to that account to anyone you choose. This is how the Campaign Development Team created our shared campaigns. We created different dummy accounts for different kinds of campaigns, to make it easier for us and our customers to find what they need. For example, a real estate agent will want to go to the "RealEstate" account and a Mary Kay Cosmetics consultant will want to go to the "MaryKay" account. Neither will want to wade through campaigns that don't interest them. Plus, one niche may have MANY campaigns created for it. If you want to see the campaign cards created by a Mary Kay consultant in our group, log out of your account and log in to user name marykaycards and password 12345. Now you can go to Manage Campaigns and see the campaign cards there. If you want to use these cards yourself or forward them to a prospect or customer, simply click on “Copy to User” and forward it to the user ID for that person. We tried to name the user name for the title of the niche, and the password is almost always 12345.

Once our Campaign Development Team created some dummy accounts and filled them with campaigns, we created the Campaign Vault. This is just an Excel spreadsheet that lists the name of the campaign, the user name and password you need to log into SOC with in order to find it, the author’s name, and the expiration date (since gift accounts can only be set up for 365 days, we will need to renew these annually).

Here is our Campaign Development Team’s request:

1. NO EDITS OR DELETES IN THE GIFT ACCOUNTS: If you are going to use these campaigns, please first familiarize yourself with how it works and PROMISE not to edit or delete anything in a Dummy Gift Account. You can edit all you want AFTER you forward it to your regular account. The Dummy Gift Account is to VIEW ONLY, and then you can forward whatever you want to your account, then edit it to your heart’s desire.
2. CONTRIBUTE TO THE CAMPAIGN VAULT by creating your own “dummy” gift accounts, then creating your own original campaigns in the Dummy Gift Account. Campaigns can only be forwarded from the "owner", so if your Dummy Gift Account "owns" the campaign, you can forward it to your own personal account by using "Copy to User" in the Manage Campaigns menu of the Dummy Gift Account. Others can also forward it to themselves from this same account. If someone they know wants it, they will not be able to forward it from their own account, but can always refer others back to the Dummy Gift Account to forward it from there. Why don’t you want to create this in your own regular account? Because you won’t want to give your own user name and password to the world by posting it in the Campaign Vault! You probably also don’t want everyone and their brother contacting YOU to forward your campaign to them when they could just as easily forward it to themselves or their own customers & prospects.
3. BE SELECTIVE ABOUT WHO YOU SHARE THE LINKS BELOW WITH. If you share it with someone who does not understand how the Dummy Gift Accounts work, someone could go in and wipe out all of our hard work or make edits that the authors would not appreciate. You are welcome to share this with customers and distributors once you have taken the time to educate them about how it works. Please do not share this with prospects. You can forward a campaign from a Dummy Gift Account to your prospect’s gift account if you want them to see a particular campaign.

A few important notes:

1. Take some time to look over the campaigns created by others, and only transfer the campaigns you want to use. It can be overwhelming to have too many campaigns in your account. Too many choices can be paralyzing!
2. Notice when you get into the Campaign Vault that it also indicates if the cards inside are custom cards. If the card has been created either as a custom card or as a PicturePlus card, you will also have to go to that part of the Card Catalog and forward those cards to your account, or you will not be able to access the campaigns with custom or PicturePlus cards used.
3. PLEASE transfer the campaigns you want and then MAKE THE CARD YOUR OWN by editing it to fit your personality and writing style. The recipient will not receive it as well if it does not sound authentic or if it does not match the way you usually write. Be sure it is sincere and it sounds like you.
4. If you select a multiple-piece campaign and do not want to use all the pieces, AFTER you have transferred it into YOUR account, you can delete the pieces you don’t want to send.
5. If you want to change the interval of time that lapses between multiple piece campaign cards, you can edit the send date. Let’s say that you copy a 6-piece campaign to your account and you only want to use cards # 1, 2 and 6. You can delete cards 3, 4, and 5 from YOUR account. Then you will need to look at the send date and edit the date for the 6th card so it goes out after card #2 on whatever date you want.

Here is where you will find links to all of the work we did as a Campaign Development Team:

http://www.bethoughtfulnow.com/cdt.html

Here is the access to the Campaign Vault, where all the user names and passwords are listed:

http://www.bethoughtfulnow.com/documents/FinishedCampaigns.xls

Let me know if you have questions about how this works:

Kathy Paauw

Kathy@orgcoach.net