Sales and Marketing Forum

Sales Process vs Relationship Development

We often hear the phase “People buy with their heart—then justify it with their brain" or , “Value comes from the relationship versus the value proposition”.

 

From these statements it may appear that the process of selling can be boiled down to being liked or relationship management.

 

Yet building a trusted relationship can be as complicated a process as validating any value proposition.

 

A sales process is effectively communicating what each party needs during the sales process and each party delivering on that need in every stage of the process.  Through a series of these communications and delivery events, a level of expectation is built between buyer and seller. If I do this.. than this occurs.  The ongoing reinforcement of these behaviors builds expectations throughout the process which leads to credibility and evolves into trust. 

 

During this process, the buyer is also building a trusted expectation that the delivery and service of the product will be similar to the experience during the sale process.  He transfers this expectation of trust from sales to delivery.

 

It is the process of reinforcing these trusted expectations which builds relationship that is inherent in every stage of an effective sale process…

 

Please visit us at www.bb2e.comor www.nextiersales.comfor all your marketing and sales resources.

A Salespersons Budget for Fluctuating Revenues

There is no better approach to dealing with tough times than maintaining a robust pipeline. For most sales persons, the anxiety of managing a budget is more difficult than just putting in the extra effort to maintain this pipeline.  And after all that is what we are good at.  “Take care of the top line and for the most part, the bottom line will take care of itself."

 

However, right now, understanding and controlling your budget and cash flow is more important than ever. In fact, proper management of your finances can mean the difference between success and failure. But it's not an easy thing to create an operating budget for a salesperson whose revenues fluctuate month to month.

-

We suggest that you:

1)     First manage your expenses

a) Determine your variable costs

b) Establish your fixed expenses

c) Project your break-even revenues required to cover these costs

2)     Forecast revenue

a) Review past revenue trends

b) Create forecasts based on what will change

c) Best case worst case scenarios

3)     Use your financial planning tools regularly

a) Build a budget and use it with other tools

b) P&L, Balance Sheet and Cash flow

-

So even if you have done everything you possibly can to build and maintain that pipeline, having a CPA or other financial advisor help you prepare a realistic and effective operating budget in light of fluctuating revenues is a great idea. 

-

Please visit us at www.bb2e.com and www.nextiersales.com for all your marketing and sales resources.

Prudent spending may be the answer to new sales!

Our most recent post discussed cutting marketing and sales expenses with a surgical approach that targets fat rather than muscle and scrutinizes these expenses based on a return-on-investment (ROI) approach.

 

However, effective spending should also be seriously considered where it makes most sense when positively affecting revenues, reducing costs of marketing/sales while maintaining or increasing overall program effectiveness.

 

While this advise may fly in the face of today' tougher economic times, an economic slowdown may squeeze a company’s bottom line, but the cause generally can be traced to the top line of the financial statement, i.e., lower revenues.  As a company cuts expenditures to preserve the bottom line, it diminishes its resources. These diminished resources lead to further revenue declines. 

 

Appropriately allocated resources is the goal.  Any new expense on a tool or approach which can help with the better or more appropriate allocation of sales and marketing resources to their highest utilization is a fiduciary responsibility of the firm.

 

Please review additional articles on CRM, Internet Marketing and Marketing ROI at www.bb2e.net/resource.htm

Tougher times create opportunities to focus marketing programs.

An alternative to a cutting marketing and sales budgets is to re-focus on only

the most effective channels and campaigns.

 

Intuitively, we know that some channels are more effective than others.

We just don’t know the degree of that effectiveness.  i.e. the old expression

“I know that I am wasting 50% of my marketing budget. I just don’t know which 50%."

 

In good times, when there is a great deal of competing marketing noise, we resist cutting back or trying something new for fear that our competitors will take advantage of us.  Now that many competitors have cut marketing back to the bone and competing marketing noise is at a minimum it is the perfect time to re-focus.

 

Put a stake in the ground and choose the one or two channels which are critical to

your success and eliminate the others for the moment.    Now, specifically measure

independent effectiveness of these two channels -  Leads, Proposals, Revenues, Cycle times. Play with increasing and decreasing the budget to see how these results change.  Once you have these results you know a much more defined baseline for your two most critical channels without the noise of other channels affecting results.

 

By adding one channel on top of this baseline will give you a good idea of the incremental value of the next channel.  You can then determine if the results of this added channel activity was worth the additional costs.

 

Please give us a call at (720) 529-5574 or look to www.nextiersales.com for additional resources.

 

Optimize video for search engines

As the video Web rapidly emerges as the largest video-distribution platform in history,

it is imperative that search engines can find your videos as easily as they can find your

other Web content. Because video search is a completely different animal than traditional

text search, take these five steps to help video search engines find your clips:

 

Create quality metadata for each video you post Video-search engines use metadata to index, categorize and rank video content.  The most important metadata are:

• Title — accurately describe your video in 40 characters or less, using upper- and lowercase letters for optimal readability.
• Description — explain exactly what users will see, emphasizing the keywords and terms for which people might search.
• Categories, tags or keywords — specify any and all relevant terms for which users are likely to search.
• Image — include a visually descriptive thumbnail, typically 60-by-60, 80-by-80 or 100-by-100 pixels.
• Publish date — typically the day you actually publish.
• Link — spell out and include the URL where a video resides.

Register your site with video search engines If you create good metadata, any video search engine worth its salt should eventually index your content. However, you can speed things up by registering with specific video search engines.

Create a media RSS feed RSS is the preferred way for most video search engines to index and update your video content.

The media RSS format uses standard fields to categorize content, virtually ensuring quality metadata. When video search engines have access to your RSS feed, they instantaneously get new video content as soon as you add it.

Have a robust library of video content Having a large library of video content, as apposed to just a clip or two, is one of the ways you can set your site apart as a serious video content provider that ranks high in search results.

Post several clips with related video content If you post more than one video on a similar topic, video search engines will leverage your other content to make “more like this” recommendations.

This will help to drive up your overall viewership and bring in more traffic.

Measuring the impact of offline media through search

Marketing in a multi-channel environment can be a significnt challenge but those that get it right can yeild enormous rewards.  One of the most challenging aspects is determining your return on your integrated online and offline media investments.

-

Offline media — specifically print, television and radio — don't offer tracking for their resulting leads or sales. However, it is important to calculate the ROI from such media to properly allocate your marketing and sales dollars, especially in today's softening economy.  Online search can capture demand generated by other media, it can help you determine the ROI for your offline marketing efforts.

-

The following steps will help you measure the ROI of your offline media: To start, have a paid search campaign in place; unlike organic search, it will allow you to test in a more controlled environment. Now identify all potential terms or phrases someone might recall from the ad.

 

Next, bid on these keyword phrases well in advance of the media launch to assess pre-campaign and post-campaign results. Be sure to maintain the same position for a given paid search keyword before and during your offline media launch since different positions may be more or less likely to be clicked-on.

 

Then analyze the before and after numbers for this group of keywords to determine whether your offline advertising led to more search volume.

 

Finally, determine whether your offline media has a positive ROI by evaluating whether this incremental search traffic was worth at least the amount spent on your offline media initiatives.  If your business is not all online, and you know, for example, that half of your business is done by phone or in stores, then you could double the search traffic (as a proxy) when calculating ROI. Search is a great marketing channel to help you better understand the ROI of your offline media.  Next time we'll take a closer look at how it applies if you are geo-targeting your media buy.

-

Please review additional articles on CRM, Internet Marketing and Marketing ROI at http://www.bb2e.com/resources.html

Marketing in a Google World

A number of new tools/techniques have evolved for effectively marketing in this so-called Google era.

-

The Google era requires a different mind-set. No longer is the focus on getting your message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Now marketers need to focus on targeted messages and message relevancy. Paid-search advertising is a leading cost-effective form of marketing because it allows marketers to place highly relevant messages in front of a target audience at the exact moment they express interest in a particular product or service.

-

However, these tactics are useless if you can't properly measure the results. Tools and techniques which integrated Google AdWords search-marketing campaigns with CRM are the new approach. This enables us to understand the source of all inbound Google AdWords leads. Once those leads are pulled from a web site into a CRM, they are tracked through the pipeline, funnel, sales cycle, from keyword to close. By integrating CRM with Google AdWords, a clear picture of ROI is achieved.  You don't have to guess what campaigns and keywords are delivering new business. You know!

-

Please review additional articles on CRM, Internet Marketing and Marketing ROI at http://www.bb2e.com/resources.html

Can this “social networking” stuff really add ecommerce value?

The future of e-commerce can be strongly linked to social networking and word of mouth marketing. Consumers have the power to advocate brands through user-generated reviews, social networking sites and interactive advertising content like online videos.

-

You need to engage your customers in a dialog, so that they get used to hearing from you.  Give them the option to create user reviews on your Web site, and be proactive and follow up with an e-mail that will encourage them to continually participate.

-

When customers get used to conversing with you, then they will be likely to write about their positive experiences and your site will not just have bad reviews.  Eighty percent of reviews are positive, because consumers want to participate in a network and trust hearing from each other more than from the retailers.

-

But it’s not just about good reviews. Bad reviews help determine bad products and identify poor quality. Firms should remove products that continue to get bad reviews. This proactive approach allows a retailer to add value to its customer and reduce non-turning inventory.

Not only are user reviews beneficial to customers, but social networks like MySpace and Second Life allow for products to be engaged more deeply and give brands a life of their own through community.

-

Brands that will survive are the ones whose consumers tell the story of the brand to each other instead of the brands telling the consumers their story. The great thing about social networks is that they also create distribution around the Web for you, and they validate the brand to other people.  Kids were integrating viral video campaigns into their own online identity and this gives the brand a greater level of authenticity.

-

More discussions and research on social networking, ecommerce and integrated sales and marketing programs can be found at www.bb2e.com/resources.html

Web / eCommerce Studies

Two excellent studies were recently published which provide a great deal of insight into online buyer behavior and how to address this user experience to enhance your return on invested online marketing dollars.

First, is the Internet Standards Assessment Report (ISAR) which can be downloaded for free through this link. ISAR provides industry benchmarks for Web site development and is based on data collected from 9,748 Web site evaluations since 1997.  The report evaluates average scores in more than 80 industries to create defined benchmarks in seven categories, including design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting and ease of use. Specific criteria are used to rate the best and worst of web development with links to examples of each.  Both competitive and functional insights can be gleaned within these industry sectors.

Second, is the "E-Commerce Metrics: Top Trends for 2006 published by MarketingSherpa.  A summary of this report with key trends noted will is available at BB2e.com's Resources. The entire report can be purchased at www.marketingsherpa.com.  Critical eCommerce trends are highlighted with recommendations to enhance online sales and customer loyalty.

Edu-Marketing with Webinars / White Papers

Edu-Marketing is fast becoming the next big wave of Permission Based Marketing. White Papers and Webinars are a leadining medium for getting effective mesages out to your target market. I will be placing a few links to sites which have been sending me good White Papers as they become available. We will also place a directory of the better White Papers on our own site for download http://www.bb2e.net/Resources.php.  Another great site for Webinar series on Internet Channels is Channel Advisor - http://www.channeladvisor.com/webinars/default.asp