“My Composer tells me that sometime this week my new theme music will deliver,“ I said to Kate as the others wandered in.

Our sales specialist asked “Why do you need theme music?” and then said, “Oh yeah, you told me you were going to have something written and arranged to use for opening speaking keynotes… you were calling it Launch as I recall.”

I responded, “It will deliver in the same week as the final results of the national launch for my client’s referral marketing program. That has turned out to be successful beyond my greatest expectations.”

“Well, there’s success and there’s success,” said Rick, the Direct Marketing Pro in our midst. “If you get it off the launching pad that is success but can it climb out of the gravity well? What kind of numbers do you have?”

“In this case I said, we had a list of the top 200 clients of another firm and their backing as strategic partner recommended to all the companies on the list. Going in they had 5 or 6 folks that were referral partners. We dropped a letter to the 200 and then called the list down.”

“You’re the expert Rick,” said Gail, our business writing doyen. “What kind of results would you expect in that situation?”

He said: “A letter and a call down will get you 1 to 1.5% but since you had a tight list and a referral of sorts that would get you from 2.5 to 5% in my experience. Anything more is remarkable. So how did your campaign do?

“We added 40 new referral partners to their list,” I said.

Chris, the digital marketing guy that meets with us whistled. Everyone turned to him. “Guys,” he said, “That’s a 20% response. That is incredible. You don’t get that unless you’re sending out a package!”

Rick said, “I totally agree. I haven’t seen anything like that since we did some very expensive packages for Disney. Are you sure it was just a letter and a call down?”

“Certain. The letter was solid and built to display a box that had an implied testimonial and recommendation. A copy of a card with an offer for the referred end users was enclosed. It offered a telephone or on-line method to get quantities of cards for the customer local sites.”

Rick said, “So you got it launched. What’s next Fletch?”

“Now we’re going to build out a sales program that touches those from across the country who have raised their hands to become referral partners. They, along with the remaining folks on the list will get a monthly newsletter. On top of that they will get two or three other touches a month via phone, letter, handwritten notes and e-mail to build the relationship so we become the automatic referral. But we need more referral sources to reach escape velocity.

We will continue to promote to the entire list we have with html e-mail messaging as only 8 of the titled individuals we’ve gone out to have opted out and those were because they could not use our services.

My guess is that we’ll have about 50 ongoing referral sources by year end.”

Rick said, “I hear it in your voice. That won’t be enough will it?”

“Based on the current data the company will be profitable at the end of September but just a few additions won’t matter. They need to invest in broadening their referral base by buying, mailing to and calling down another list of 1500+ with the titles we need to be effective,” I said.” If we can get just 10% of that list to sign up we will have escape velocity.

If they agree to buy the list and mail to them they can soar. If they don’t they will go down in flames.”

The Takeaway

The launch isn’t over until you have escape velocity. Invest to reach sustainability.

Jerry Fletcher’s blog recaps conversations with clients, prospects and the unruly mob of business development professionals he consorts with. They discuss marketing that works from solopreneur to enterprise level. Jerry Fletcher is the ringleader and “Watson” of the dialogue. Learn how to profit from all his publishing at www.JerryFletcher.com/Profit.html

Jerry has been researching and implementing small business marketing that builds businesses, careers and lives of joy for 25 years as President of Z-axis Marketing, Inc. Learn more at www.JerryFletcher.com

Schedule a personal appearance. Jerry speaks internationally on Networking, Marketing and Contact Relationship Magic. www.NetworkingNinja.com