A finance term is a gift from the sales gods. A hard wired compelling event. No “I’ll think about its”, “what ifs” or “maybe laters”. A sure fired “get off your butt and do something” moment in the life of your customer. Of course it is a staple of your pipelines and sales activity. Right?
Wrong.
Very, very few equipment finance companies run end of term sales and marketing strategies. Before I get into the astonishing reasons why, let’s describe what these strategies are (in case you feel a little dizzy). Imagine a programmatic sales and marketing engine that hit your customers with a message/call starting 18 months (depending on asset class of course), then 12 months, 9 months, 6 months, 3 months, 1 month, etc. Maybe you start with email and reinforce with calling activity. Companies doing this get:
- An easy path to refinance, renewal or replacement
- Equipment additions they likely wouldn’t have gotten before
- The general feeling like you might actually care about them
- A percentage of their portfolio as an “annuity-like” stream that you can plan on and forecast
There are all kinds of cool ways to make this exciting, innovative and fun for your company, but those are the basic wins for those that employ this strategy. In our time as marketers this approach has NEVER been anything but massively successful. Not even once.
Most equipment finance companies DO NOT do this. I know, right. Here’s the punch line: it’s the data. Most equipment finance companies do such a terribly bad job of managing customer data, they cannot easily access a list of decision maker contact information for upcoming end of term deals. Shocking huh. Further, turnover is so high among sales and sales management that many companies who are not equipment finance hogs become out of sight, out of mind. No one remembers who did that deal and the golden opportunity withers on the vine. This is almost sad.
Now…time to bake your noodle. After buying a little UCC data on prospects, you can actually run a renewal campaign on your competitors. You know the time of the filing and the asset. If you know the asset you know the likely term. Make a guess and drop their name in the hat for marketing end of term. A smart salesperson can make their number on this alone. COOOLIO.
Get the data figured out gang. Easy money is waiting. And if you ever wanna chat give us a holler.