A highly targeted, baseball-themed-mailer helps communications giant Sprint score with C-level decision makers.

Selling wireless services with baseball may seem a little odd, but Sprint’s business-to-business marketers know that its efforts to reach C-level enterprise decision makers often need to take a different approach.

So when the industry marketing team saw agency Euro RSCG’s idea for a unique dimensional mailing targeting C-level technology, information and operations leaders at larger client companies, they knew they had an idea that would help them score big.

The mailer, a rectangular box cushioning a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat, used a baseball theme to communicate the brand’s key marketing messages in early 2008, before the current “Now Network” campaign was introduced. The goal? To get a face-to-face meeting between an account representative and the recipient.

Headlines like “Dominate the playing field,” “Swing for the fences” and “Step up to the big leagues” helped the brand promote Nextel Direct Connect and location-based services solutions to recipients who were handpicked by the sales force.

“We didn’t use the typical purchased mailing list for this,” explains Chris Horner, Sprint group manager for industry marketing. “It was an expensive piece, so we had to be smart about whom we sent it to. We asked our account teams to provide names of high-level decision makers they thought were ready to hear about this.”

The mailer included a meeting invitation personalized with the senior account manager’s contact information and an incentive to schedule that meeting: Each executive would receive a voucher for a professional baseball jersey for his of her team of choice after the in-person session.

“It was one of the most successful mailings we’ve done of this type,” says Bronson Broockerd, Sprint general manager of direct, e-mail and mobile marketing. And while return on investment is hard to calculate with this type of solutions selling, Broockerd notes that the response rates are “extremely high.”

Now that’s a home run.