This past month in June, RPMC connected with Amazon Best Seller and Referral Marketing Leader Gus Skarlis on a project to spearhead his mobile app launch geared toward the automotive industry.
Company Profile: RePostable, an innovative, new app that allows automotive dealership staff and team members to receive rewards for posting dealership discounts and coupon offers directly to their social media platforms. Different than wide spread social media blasts by company marketing departments, this honed marketing strategy is unlike other referral marketing platforms in that it enables staff members to post offers immediately to their circles of influence.
Scope-of-Work: RPMC’s role in the launch was to devise and craft a strategy for the front line, initial marketing engagement between RePostable and upper management at targeted automotive dealerships. RPMC and Mr. Skarlis collaborated on the cold call script to identify what the best, most effective conversation would be to make an impactful first 
touch with dealership management in an industry already inundated with cold calls. RPMC would craft this script, make the 1st phase of calls, debrief and revise, execute the 2nd phase of calls, while documenting the process along the way.
To give a little bit of insight into the current state of cold calling, the conventional cold call script of old is far different than what is effective in today’s world. While traditionally cold callers have flooded the phone lines with one-call close attempts, today and the future’s adaptation has much more to do with overcoming the stigma associated with cold calls of the past, reintroducing ourselves as humans to be trusted before any forward progress can be made.
Results: Taking this into account with RePostable’s marketing launch, our goal was to introduce the platform to executives and request specific information to begin forming a relationship between Mr. Skarlis, the RePostable app, and the dealership executives. The goal and expectation set for RPMC was to obtain the appropriate information from just 10% of dealership executive calls in this cold call averse market.
D
uring Phase 1, RPMC was able to successfully connect with 20% of the dealerships, honing in on what drew them to being open to the app and taking the next step forward with RePostable. After calibrating and rewriting the script, RPMC identified some key factors missing in the first phase, before successfully increasing the connections to 30% of total calls by the end of the project.
An interesting piece learned from this project is that in many of the conversations with executives, the true stigma against cold callers was evident almost immediately. Some executives
and owners said they received up to 40 calls a day, leaving a clear and sensible reason for their opposed view of cold callers. With this being said, many of these executives were much more open to RPMC and RePostable’s message once we are able to slow down the conversation, diffuse the salesman stigma, and reintroduce ourselves as someone who could significantly contribute to their organization.
Moving Forward: This initial project acted as a plow for Gus Skarlis and RePostable, laying the right foundation of fertile ground for the big push ahead. Now that the foundation and template has been set, the RePostable app can now move ahead with not only a script and strategy, but an expectation of results to form a team and department around that is a sizable piece of their sales funnel puzzle.