In my last update I mentioned having started something called Grand Rapids Excel Meetup as a lead generation method. My plan was and is:
- Establish a venue for the meetup and an initial meeting date
- Promote the first meeting on social media, and by reaching out directly to people who I think might be interested
- Write a sales letter and mail it to local accountants, banks, and maybe other types of businesses likely to use Excel
- Call those same businesses to invite their owners/employees to come to the first meeting
I’ve done step 1 and I’ve done step 2 to about the extent that I’m going to. My target was to have at least 15 people at the first meeting. Right now I have 15 members in the group with 10 RSVPs. I’m pleasantly surprised that the numbers are so high with what little promotion I’ve done so far. There are also a few other people who have told me they’re planning to attend and haven’t RSVP’d on meetup.com.
I wrote a sales letter a week or two ago. I came back to the sales letter, re-read it, thought, “What the hell was I thinking?!” and completely re-wrote it. I checked the re-written version today and only found one small part I didn’t like. I’ll probably go with the version I have now after I make that small modification. I’ll probably send the first round of mailings on the week of January 4th, and then do a round of mailings every week until the first meeting on January 27th.