St. Jude's/ Fitness for a Cure Part 2....

A little over 6 months ago I wrote a post about the upcoming St. Jude's fundraiser I was attending in Massachusetts. The fundraiser turned out to be just as amazing as I expected it to be. That night the Fitness for a Cure Gala raised $300,000 and became the biggest fundraiser in New England. It’s no secret as to why when you consider Sherri Sarrouf and the people who are part of Fitness for a Cure. The thing that is really special about the group is that they don’t just organize a fundraiser a few months out of the year, they are involved with St. Jude’s year round and are always working to help make each child’s life a little better. One of the events Fitness for a Cure participates in is traveling from New England to St. Jude’s in Memphis, TN and performing dance routines for the patients and families. While they are there they interact with many of the families and learn about many of the children’s’ battles with their illnesses and their stories. One of the best parts about this group is that they take these stories home with them and not only share them with others (such as myself) but make an effort to stay in contact with many of the children they meet. Yesterday I received an e-mail about one of the patients they met while at St. Jude’s a few weeks ago and the story about their interaction. I’d like to share this story with you. While the Fitness for a Cure group was at St. Jude’s they met a 10 year old boy named Evan who is currently fighting stage 4 high risk neuroblastoma. One day while they were there, the members of the Fitness for a Cure dance team were able to show off some of their dance moves to Evan and his mom. Later on in the day his mom confessed it was the first time she’d seen Evan laugh and smile in weeks. They were able to attend the Fitness for a Cure performance the next day and spent the whole day with the team. As Sherri said, “It was one of those times where the family just wanted to stay with our team.” Eventually the Fitness for a Cure team had to leave Memphis but was committed to staying in touch with Evan. When they got back they heard he wasn’t doing well so they sent him a video. Evan responded and sent this video back. (If that doesn’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.) Last night the Fitness for a Cure team sent Evan a video back, a bad dancing competition for him to judge.(You know he’ll have fun with that!) Sherri and her team are the perfect example of what I was trying to convey in my previous post; what is truly means to build relationships with people. That is why Fitness for a Cure is so special. The relationships they build with children at St. Jude’s and the lives they touch are invaluable. I think that as business professionals, but more importantly as people we can only hope to build relationships as simple and special as the ones Fitness for a Cure does. If you want to follow Evan on his journey please visit his Caring Bridge site and say a prayer for him. The Thomason family greatly appreciates all of the prayer and support they receive.

Creating Content That Builds; Not Sells

One of the things I’ve always tried to focus on when putting together marketing materials for Topaz is not wasting anyone’s time. We send one e-mail a week, always on the same day (Tuesday) to our database. My goal is always to make it something relevant, something that could be potentially useful to the receiver and something I believe in. Being in a sales and marketing role sometimes you’re perceived as someone who will spew any information and hope someone grabs a hold of it and you can create a sale out of it.

One of the best ways I’ve learned about how useless “sales pieces” can come off is by receiving many of them in my own e-mail in-box and telephone voice mail. Every day I receive at least one sales e-mail or call from a representative at a company asking me to buy something or tell me more about it. These are a few of the things I notice from these calls and e-mails and a few mistakes I try not to make when marketing to our clients.

•Don’t e-mail or call me if I’m not part of the cliental that would ever do business with you. You have to at least do a little research to have a target audience. Don’t call me and ask me to buy a pool float when I audit corporate travel. I never fully blind e-mail or call anyone. I only contact those who are in our database from doing business with us, those who have contacted us or those who have a large corporate travel volume and who I think will genuinely benefit from our services. I also never call anyone before I’ve researched what they do and their previous business history with us. If you are going to blind call me, know something about me that is relevent to the call. I’m telling you, this extra quick research can make all the difference.

•Please make the subject line and at least the first couple sentences of your e-mail or phone call interesting. “Dir sir/madam,” “To whom this may concern” “Are you looking for any of the following….” DELETE. Use my name, ask me a relevant question specific to me, have a top 10 list….just something that at least makes me read the first paragraph of what you have to say! I try to focus on engaging our clients from the moment they see the subject line of the e-mail. There are many people that delete e-mails without opening them, so at least give yourself a chance by making the subject line worth opening.

•Don’t always ask me or tell me something, GIVE me something. I love getting free content, white papers, research, survey answers…..anything that I can use and learn from is clutch. I don’t have free content to send in every e-mail, but I at least send something of high value to my clients for free every couple of weeks. The weeks in between I try to at least ask them important questions, and communicate items of interest to them that they may not have known before.

•Let me unsubscribe! Don’t make me e-mail you and ask you to stop e-mailing me. Don’t waste your time e-mailing people every week that just delete your e-mails. Have an unsubscribe button so those not interested can do so in a quick and easy manner!

•Always have a call to action and multiple ways to reach you! If someone is interested in what you have to say they want to know what to do next. I always try to direct our clients of what to do next if they like what they see. I also list every possible way to reach us including e-mail, phone number, website, and all of our social media sites. The easier you make it for people to reach you, the quicker they will.


•Believability: If I think you believe in something and are sincere about it, I’m much more likely to believe in it also! It’s the language you use, the way you write, the way you format your e-mail…it all affects believability. Focus on this, even if it takes a little extra time!

I always want my clients to know that I am sending them something because I believe they may be truly interested in it, I’ve retrieved their contact information from a reliable source and think they are a good target for what I am sending. I want to grab their attention from the moment they see it and hope to creatively ask them the right questions. I genuinely enjoy giving them free content they can use because that is how you build relationships. Not by selling, but by gaining trust from those in your target market that what you do is valuable, the service you provide is superior, and that you genuinely believe your product or service can help them. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. If they don’t want to read our content, I will not be offended if they unsubscribe. It saves us both time and money! I actually appreciate it. The one thing I would add to an unsubscribe button is a “reason box” which asks why the client unsubscribed. I’m all for learning from your own clients! Listening to the negative to create positive change! I want all of our clients to find contacting us extremely simple. I want them to know I will always pick up a phone, return a voicemail, respond to an e-mail, respond to a question on Facebook or our website…whatever it is; I always try to respond as promptly and as informatively as possible. I believe in what Topaz does. I believe what we do genuinely helps our clients and is something that no one else can do as well as us. I hope that comes across in every piece of “marketing material” I send out. In the end, most importantly, I want to build relationships with our clients, not just sell. I think building those relationships eventually creates sales, as opposed to trying to sell someone and then have a surface level relationship to complete the transaction. I look forward to meeting new people, working with them, gaining their trust, and allowing them to see what I see in Topaz.