Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Are Your Sales Stuck In A Rut?






If you have a unique product, excellent customer service and visions for expansion, you're off to a good start.  However, if you're having trouble achieving sales growth and your numbers have stalled, it may be time to re-evaluate your situation.  Every business has room for improvement, but many get stuck in a rut. 

Consider these three common problems:

Under-Developed Brand.  This is a very common pitfall for both newer and mature businesses.  Many companies think that once they have come up with the perfect product and eye-catching logo, they are done with their branding.  However, if you look at some of the most successful businesses like Starbucks, Apple or Microsoft, they all have a common thread: Their brand distinguishes them.  While these companies are now industry behemoths, it's important to remember they weren't always the giants they've become.  They created a culture that was centered on their product and associated their brand with things that matter most to their targeted audience.

The solution to your problem is two-fold.  First, you need to decide on your target audience. Rather than trying to appeal to everyone, focus on the audience that would benefit most from your products.  Once you've determined you targeted demographic, you can begin by crafting your brand. Find out what matters most to these prospects and figure out why they would benefit from your products.  Doing this can dramatically increase the perceived value and demand for your products.

Inefficient or Impractical Business Processes.  As you business has grown, so does the complexity of your business operations and the data  you need to track.  In the beginning, it may have been okay to keep paper ledgers or handle data with Excel spreadsheets, or to use Outlook for all customer relations, or to use a white board or paper lists to keep track of inventory.  But if you don't automate routine and detailed tasks once business grows, you limit your growth and profitability.

Industry publications and articles about apps and productivity can help you find tools to automate and/or simplify many business processes.  If you don't have much of a budget for software solutions, search Google, etc. for terms such as "low cost project management software".  Ask other business people in your network about productivity solutions they use.

Lack of Realistic Short-Term and Long-Term Goals.  Every business is born from a grand vision.  All owners start their companies with dreams of long-term success, but unfortunately, these dreams are not always enough to sustain continued growth.  A common problem that owners run into is a lack of specific planning.  In order to experience continued progress and expansion, you need short-term as well as long-term ideas to achieve success.

The best solution for this is to step back and write down long-term goals for your business.  Once you have a concrete list, prioritize these goals by deciding which ones need to be accomplished first.  You can then use your long-term goals as an outline for determining short-term goals.  For each long-term goal, you will need several steps to reach it. Those steps will be your short-term goals.  For both long and short-term goal setting, you may want to practice SMAC.  When setting objectives, they should be SPECIFIC, MEASURABLE, ACHIEVABLE and COMPATIBLE.  That is, all goals should be agreed upon by all parties involved in the process.





Thursday, February 23, 2017

Tips For Better Email Marketing - Part II















With Part I, I suggested that a lot of your email recipients may scan your email without reading all the copy.  That's why you want to have a clear call-to-action button that's easy to spot for even the quickest of email scanners.  Without a call-to-action button, you won't be asking your recipients to take any action that actually benefits them -- and the potential growth of your sales.  For example, you might put a call-to-action to download a free white paper or video that describes new strategies for using your product.

Add links to your images.  Your ultimate goal with email marketing is to get prospects to click through to a web page on your site.  One way to increase the clickthrough without littering the copy with links is to add a link to your images in the email. 

Include noticeable text links.  In general, it's a good idea to link to your featured offer in multiple places in addition to the clear and focused call-to-action button.  In addition to your main call-to-action buttons and images, consider including a noticeable text link (or two).  Having more links increases the opportunity for engagement. 

Place at least one of these clickable elements above the fold.  One way to make your emails more clickable is to make your clickable elements, whether it's a call-to-action button, a text link, or a clickable image, near the beginning of your email.  This is especially useful for mobile users.  Mobile tends to require a lot of scrolling, and sometimes squinting, pinching and zooming.  Giving a recipient something actionable that is seen upon opening can lead to more clicks in this environment.










Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Tips For Better Email Marketing - Part I









Thankfully, there are a few little things that you can start doing immediately to improve the open rates, clickthrough rates, and lead generation for your email nurturing program.

Email new prospects within 24 hours.  It's important to take advantage of the window of opportunity when your company or product is at the top of your prospects' minds.  You can really get a pulse of what future engagement will look like by what people do when you email them within 24 hours.  If you don't have any automated email workflows set up, you're likely missing out on some major opportunities to nurture and engage your existing prospects.  If you haven't already done so, find and implement a personalized, automated email workflows that can be triggered in a number of ways: when a prospect gets added to a list, submits a form on your website, clicks a link in an email, views a page on a blog, clicks on one of your AdWord ads, or becomes a marketing qualified lead.

Send your email from a real person, not your company.  When you send email from a real person, your email open rate increases.  Plain and simple, recipients are typically more likely to trust a personalized sender name and email address than a generic one.  People are so inundated with spam now days, they often hesitate to open email from unfamiliar senders -- and they're more likely to trust a personalized sender name than a generic one.

Pre-set the preview text.  Outlook, Gmail and other email apps allow you to display the first few lines from the body of your email alongside the subject line.  Use it to provide a short, to-the-point synopsis of what you're offering -- and keep it to 50 characters or less. When you don't set the preview text, the prospect will automatically pull from the body of your email, which may be confusing, but is also a wasted opportunity to engage your audience.

Keep your emails short.  Everyone's busy and their inbox is already full.  Why add to the problem with a huge, long email?  People generally like short, concise emails better than long ones. Plus, when they're scanning through all their emails in a short amount of time, they're more likely to skim and glean the overall message before deciding to take any action.  To keep your emails short, write like you're talking to someone in real life. 



Monday, February 20, 2017

Improve Your Lead Nurturing Strategy - Part II

 Your lead nurture efforts should include qualitative and well as quantitative goals -- what business outcomes do you hope to get from setting up a lead nurture program?  Consider the following qualitative goals:

Convert sales inquiries to qualified prospects over time.

Move your prospects through their buying process at an accelerated pace.

Engage in conversations with your prospects.

Qualify and collect more information from inbound leads.

Educate and build trust among existing leads.

Stay in touch with existing leads so they call on your company when the need arises.

Acquire more business from current customers.

Turn dormant leads to active leads.

Increase sales productivity by distributing only sales ready leads.


Depending on your unique business case, choose some of these goals or set your own.  Setting these overall qualitative goals for your lead nurturing campaigns will help you make better decisions on timing, frequency, segmentation and offer strategy.


In addition to creating qualitative objectives, be sure to set goals that are quantitative - those that you can measure. Even if you aren't sure what your metrics should be initially, setting estimates up front helps you define your program.  Quantitative metrics not only help you define success, but they help you determine the scope and scale of your overall lead nurturing efforts.


Without quantitative goals in place your lead nurturing program can lack purpose and you'll have a greater difficulty tracking your progress toward your objectives.


Friday, February 3, 2017

Improve Your Lead Nurturing Strategy - Part I


    The key to designing an effective lead nurture program is taking stock of your current lead management processes.  By asking the right questions, you will not only uncover opportunities for improvement, but the information will also play a critical role in defining issues of workflow.  Invite sales into the process for this initial discovery process.  Giving sales a voice ensures that you have a holistic view of your leads.  Here are five questions to ask about your current lead management process.


How many leads do you generate each month and what is the source of those leads?  Understanding the scale and source of leads helps to determine the scale of your lead nurturing program.  The number of leads you generate has an impact on how many segments you create and the frequency of communication since you may well need to speak to different audiences at different times. 


What are the key audience groups that comprise your inbound leads?
How different are your leads from one another in terms of industry, company size, product interest, buying interest, and so on?  To what extent do these groups require different messaging?  The higher the number of distinct groups, the better, in order for your campaigns to be relevant and effective. 


How are leads responded to, distributed, and managed today? 
How often does a lead hear from your company over time?  Knowing how you follow-up with, and prioritize leads currently can help steer your lead nurturing program in a direction where its most likely to have the most impact on ROI.  When taking stock of ongoing communication, don't just consider formal marketing programs (i.e. email, etc.).  Determine too how often sales reaches out to these same leads.


What percentage of your leads are considered sales ready when they enter your database?
Knowing where each lead is in their "buying cycle" is critical to determining how to set up your lead nurture program and how to measure your ROI.  Additionally, knowing your average days to sales opportunities and conversion can help you benchmark how lead nurturing accelerates your leads.


What is the range of products that you offer?
Some companies market very homogenous product lines, others market a multitude of products.  The diversity of your offerings plays a large role in determining the number of tracks in your program, in addition to the messaging and offer strategy to each group of leads.


Source: Marketo







Think Content More Than SEO











Some SEO purists suggest that website content be optimized at all times. It's inevitable that someone, or a team, will follow an internal process and think about the content with an everything - SEO mentality.  But there are situations when you don't need to sweat SEO - or can at least scale back the effort.  A few examples follow.


The desired keywords are too competitive.  You may want to rank on the first page for "CRM tool," which is searched an estimated 2,900 times a month according to Google.  But, typically, your site ranks on the first page of Google for keywords searched 300 to 500 times a month.  Are you really going to build your SEO strategy around the phrase "CRM tool"?  If the keyword phrase is beyond your reach, you may want to accept your competitive position and weigh alternative keyword phrases.  Here are some questions to consider when selecting a different phrase:


  • Will the keyword phrase work in the headline?
  • Will the search volume be high enough?
  • Will the keyword phrase be relevant?
  • What are the odds that the optional phrase in your content will rank?
Visitors arrive from various sources.  SEO doesn't need to be the top dog in your content.  Your website content should engage and satisfy prospects when they arrive through:
  • Website navigation that highlights the content.
  • E-mail marketing.
  • Shared links.
  • Media relations.
  • Social media.
Who cares about keywords for which you can't rank well or phrases that  people hardly use if most of your traffic doesn't come from search?  Analyze where your overall traffic comes from and identify key performance indicators targeting your ideal mix of channels to drive traffic.


You're writing about a new trend.  Sometimes, you want to be out front with a new industry phrase long before it's widely used.  The phrase may not even have any or much detectable search volume. Writing about an emerging technology or trend will highlight your expertise and vision.  SEO may not be top of mind when shaping the content, but you'll be rewarded later on search engines for having a content-first approach.  As your content ages and attracts inbound links and interest, you'll be a in a good position to rank well as the keyword phrase gains momentum.








MY OBJECTIVE:

To share common sense lessons learned with 40-plus years experience in marketing, sales and as a B2B publisher.

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