Writing A Right Letter At The Right Time

The typical executive will prefer to hire someone younger than himself or herself. Regardless of federal law, this is a fact of life, and any executive can find lots of rationales for not hiring older applicants. So face this regrettable certainty and learn the ages of your prospects when you gather information. Then you can put more emphasis on prospects who are your age or older.

TIMING

As you develop your research information further and begin to concentrate on your prospect lists, consider this: Studies have shown that many executives make the greatest number of changes in staff about a year after they themselves have been hired. If you read last year's membership directory in the field you are exploring and then compare the member listings against those in the current directory, you can target some prime prospects quickly.



Your Next Step

Armed with your prospect lists, return to your library and consult the directories that list what has been printed and where. The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature is a good place to start. Also, many libraries now have computers that allow you to search for articles by topic and by author. Use these resources to search for articles written by or about:

• The department head to whom you will be mailing your marketing letter
  
  
• The department head's specialty field
  
  
• The organization
  
  
• Changes or trends within the industry
  

Read the articles. Consider what impact each may have on the executive whom you plan to contact. Consider the impact on his or her department. Explore for insights that will tell you more about the personality or style of the individual as well as the organization.

Setting Up Your System

Don't wait until your direct-marketing campaign is in full gear before you develop a way to keep track of your prospects. You want to have a functioning system at your fingertips before the reply calls and letters start coming in. If you have a computer, you should develop a program that will function to the fullest extent your equipment allows. You should have a separate record for each prospect. The ideal would be a mail- merge system that allows you to use the same data base to print addresses on envelopes, create individual or repetitive letters, and keep track of the status of each prospect.

How you do this will be entirely up to you, of course, but at the very least you will need the following:

Records have a permanent record of the names, titles, organizations, and addresses of every single person to whom you send a letter. If you find that you should be in contact with a different person within any organization, change your records immediately. If you are put in touch with additional people within any organization, add them to your records at once. Keep yourself up to date on this and you will never regret it; fall behind and you may send the wrong letter to the wrong person and put yourself out of the running.

A Card System Develop a prospects card system. If you don't plan to store the information in a computer, you should use 5- by 8-inch index cards.

Your Direct-Marketing Letter

You want to mail your direct-marketing letter to as many prospects as possible and as quickly as possible. A wait-and-see attitude will only cost you valuable time. If you send out a handful of letters this week and you get no responses right away, how long are you willing to wait before you send out more? Another week? Two more weeks?

What if none of those get responses? And what if you get only one or two responses out of, say, the ten letters you mailed during that period? Will you repeat the process? If so, you are in for an unnecessarily long period of unemployment.

If you researched your market thoroughly, you should have come up with at least one hundred prospective employers. If you mail letters to all of them at the same time, you cut your waiting period significantly.

YOUR LETTER'S FUNCTION

Letters, however, are not intended to bring in job offers. What is their function, then, if not to get you a job? Their purpose is to condition the market, to let your prospects know you are out there. If one or two prospects happen to take the initiative and invite you in for interviews, that's great. It's also the stuff of which dreams are made.

Follow-up

No matter how powerful your letter might be, if you want any real action, you will have to take the next step. You will have to follow up with phone calls to find out what happened to your letter. Make your first calls in about ten days. You may find that any one of the following may have happened to it:

• It may not have been received.
  
  
• It may not have been read.
  
  
• It may have gone to the wrong person.
  
  
• It may have been forwarded to the right person.
  
  
• It may even have been forwarded to another wrong person.
  
  
• The recipient may not have placed you as high on his or her priority list as you would like.
  
  
• He or she may be waiting to see whether you follow through on your correspondence.
  
  
• There may not be an opening and the recipient felt no obligation to call or write you to let you know that.
  
  
• A form letter that promises to "keep your resume on file" may be on its way to you.
  

And that doesn't exhaust all the possibilities by any means. The responses may have you making changes on your prospects cards or in the computer. They may have you sending out new letters to different people in the same organizations. They may even have you ready to stop making any more calls.

Perhaps a fear of the unknown—a legitimate concern over what to say when you call—explains why not everyone in every organization works in sales or marketing. Most people are just not cut out for the prospecting task—at least not until they get desperate or lucky. Like it or not, selling is your job for now, so why wait for either desperation or good fortune? Why not act at once?