Never Ending Thoughts…

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

Source: http://www.loc.gov/

Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is the first holiday of the year in United States. It’s observed on the third Monday of January each year, which is around the time of King’s birthday, January 15. You can read more about it here. Being first holiday of the year, for many businesses it brings the chance to once again entice customers and keep their sales going on. In this article I will cover how small businesses can leverage Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday to generate more sales. This is just an introduction to a topic that can be discussed in much more detail and can be covered by taking lot of examples. So feel free to shoot me a mail or reply to this post and keep the conversation live!

Choose the Right Campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend

Source: http://bargainbabe.com

Since this is not a major holiday, don’t expect people exchanging gifts. So you can leave the gift items out from your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Promotion. You should rather focus on items that people would have missed buying during the holiday season.

This holiday comes after most people receive their first paycheck of the year. So many people would want to spend that money in things that are important or things they couldn’t buy during the holidays. So your best bet would be to run promotions on house hold items, perhaps giving away discounts on yearly maintenance subscriptions and so forth.

Choose the Right Time of the Day or Weekend

best-of-web.com

Keep in mind that Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is mostly observed by US Federal employees. It’s not a mandatory holiday, so many businesses are actually open on that day! This means that many people would be actually working on that day and will only be able to come in the evening.

To get maximum results, start the sale on the day before the holiday (that is Sunday) and continue throughout the holiday.

Take logistics Very Seriously!

Source: http://openclipart.org

Why am I being so direct about it? That’s because as the well known saying goes “First Impression is the Last Impression”. This is probably going to be your first promotion of the year. If you fail to make your customers happy in this first promotion, perhaps due to delivery delays, misleading promotion message, or any other reason, this might become your last chance to promote anything successfully in the whole year! On the other hand, if you do a good job, you can pretty much consider yourself winning a jackpot! Now that the customer is happy he/she is definitely going to check back in on almost all (if not every) weekend/holiday promotion in the coming year. This is your chance to put your best foot in front of new customers, so take all the time to plan it right and make sure your logistics are in place.

By keeping these simple but very important points in mind, you can rest assured your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Sale Campaign is going to be successful. But as they say “The Devil is in the Details.”; So feel free to share your thoughts!

Holiday Season is one of those times of the Year when you as a  Business Owner have an upper edge; the customer is in the mood to spend money! What can you do to take this rare opportunity and generate more sales? Of course we know it. Running holiday promotions and holiday discount deals are the most common methods. However, many businesses, specially the small and local businesses, still fail to generate outstanding sales during holiday season. The only ones that do generate good sales are the ones that have already built some reputation over the years and are able to take advantage of repeat business during holidays.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the things that small and local businesses can do to generate more leads during holiday season and thereby increase their probability of generating more sales. Since every business is unique we can’t come up with a “one size fits all” solution. So in this article, I will cover some of the basic and common tactics and ideas that would apply to most (if not all) businesses, and in the next few articles I will touch upon specific businesses. I will try to cover as many local businesses as I can. If you can’t find ideas that are relevant to your business, please do write back and I’ll try to cover them!

Start Your Holiday Promotion At the Right Time

Start too late and you’d probably have very less time for the information to spread. Many people would have already bought what they were looking for. Start too early and either most people will forget about the deal (remember many people wait until the end to do their shopping), or you’ll fall into the risk of your competitors copying your promotion idea! Generally a good time to start a holiday promotion is one month before holidays. This gives the campaign enough time to spread and at the same time gives people just enough time to take advantage of the promotion.

Schedule a New Product Launch during Holiday Season

Many businesses launch products on their predefined time lines that sometimes don’t match with key holiday dates such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. And when the holiday season comes, the only approach they have is to reduce the price of their existing products. That is not the smartest of the moves.

Remember that customers are in the mood to spend. You should leverage this opportunity to release new products and if possible at bare bones discount price. Keep in mind that during holiday season people are in the mood to buy gifts, they want to buy something that’s new and has just arrived at the stores; and many are willing to pay a premium for that one gift that has just hit the market. Why not leverage this rare opportunity and introduce new products instead of reducing price of the old ones?

Give Special Deal to your Existing Customers

This one just makes sense. Getting repeat business from your existing customers is easiest during holiday season. If they are already happy with you, then it’s even more easy! All you have to do is come up with some deal that would make sense for your customer and offer them during holiday season.

This could be a contract renewal with some new added features for free for first three months, 5% extra shipment on the next order, free shipping, or anything that you can do to get repeat business.

Find Your Niche and Remain Focused

Even though there are more people ready to spend money during holidays, there is still more competition. Just like you, your competitors are going to try every single bit to attract attention. The fact is that in some cases your competition is going to outbid you and in some cases you are going to outbid your competition. The best thing to do in this case is to carefully identify your niche and remain focused. For example, you could be selling custom design apparel and as part of this holiday season, you might want to focus on what would work best in your favor instead of running promotions all across the board. For instance, if you have a new line of children clothing ready to hit the shops by around Christmas, then you should focus on running a promotion just for that. The idea is to carefully evaluate what type of promotion you’ll be able to run most successfully and keep focused on that. This will help you limit your competition and get the maximum out of your promotion.

Get Your Customers Involved at the right time and Reward Them for referrals

Holiday season is one of the best time to get new business based on referrals from existing customers. Again, for the same reason – there are many deals going on and customers are in the mood to spend. Your existing customers are the best sales team you can have. They not only pay for your product, they evaluate it for you, give you feedback and if rewarded appropriately they can bring lot of new business to you! However the trick is to get them involved early in the game. Discuss upcoming promotions with your key customers and get them involved. Give them enough time to promote your holiday deal and reward them nicely for their efforts.

So here are five basic things you can do irrespective of what kind of business you are in and generate more leads and sales during holiday season than you had been doing so far! In the next post I will pick up one local business and discuss ideas of how to grow sales during holidays. If you have some business in mind that you’d like to discuss please feel free to let me know!

Courtesy: SachinWalia.Net (http://tinyurl.com/3dpyb53)

In one of my previous posts – “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend of Sales And Marketing” – I tried to put a new perspective on the way Sales and Marketing can be done. I provided my justification on why it makes lot of sense for Sales and Marketing efforts to merge and complement each other. However, I realized that even though it all makes sense and looks simple, it’s still really hard to implement in real life. In this article I will try to cover the top three reasons why such an endeavor could fail.

Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams “Doing Each Others’ Job” Or “Helping Each Other Out”?

Take for example an Email Marketing Campaign. When designing an Email Marketing Campaign, there is a lot that the Marketing Team can borrow from Sales. For example adding details of an upcoming promotion in the email, or perhaps using marketing technologies that seamlessly integrate with the company’s Sales CRM solution. However the “design” and “template” of the Email, or the “Marketing Slogan” & “Punch Line” is really something that Marketing Team should be doing. It’s not that a Sales guy cannot come up with a good marketing punch line; but get this: If the sales guys start spending too much time on thinking about marketing slogans and marketing strategies, who is going to “actually sell” the product!

One way out of this is to simply “use common sense”. See where to draw the line. Of course it’s not going to be easy. So use time management tools for the first few months to figure out where exactly the line exists in your company and then use that knowledge to teach your sales and marketing teams about how to effectively work with each other but not work on each others’ tasks.

Are You Merging Your Sales and Marketing Charts?

Another thing to watch out when working on a combined sales and marketing strategy is forgetting that at the end of the day these are two different tasks. At a granular level both these tasks run on different parameters and are measured by different parameters. For example using marketing related parameters to define and monitor your sales process will most probably make it worse and vice-versa.

Is Your Smarketing Effort Turning Into Resource Optimization?

Many people have this misconception that by effectively combining sales and marketing efforts they’ll be able to work on the same goals with lesser staff. That might come out to be true as you stern ahead and put new processes and p0licies in place to make smarketing work, but it definitely should not be your first (or even any) goal. Smarketing helps sales and marketing teams work in coherence. It does not, in any way, aim at delegating tasks between sales and marketing in an effort to optimize resource allocation. As explained earlier too, the last thing that you want to do is get sales work done from marketing folks and marketing work done from sales folks.

Have you tried combining sales and marketing efforts in your company? What was the reaction? What issues have you faced? Feel free to share!

There are over 100 social media networks in the World. Let's forget the bottom 97; and you are left with the two main networks that pretty much define the current social media landscape. Yes I'm talking about facebook and twitter. And now we have Google with the Google+ creeping into this landscape.

In this article I will show some of the examples of how the growing number of Social Media Networks is causing headache, confusion and (for lack of better terms) lot of wastage of money in marketing.

While I have some ideas of how this can be minimized, but hey, I'm no "guru" here. So if you have a better idea, please do share!

The "What Message Goes Where" Problem

The biggest problem that marketing managers face is that how do you figure out what message goes on which Social Media Network. Simply copying and pasting the same message on all the networks might not be the best idea. The reason is that all Social Networks have their own "theme" and if your actions are not in sync with that "theme", you are bound to fail on that network. Starbucks for example does a wonderful job in managing their facebook and twitter pages. They use facebook for mainly having their fans share their thoughts about the company and their coffee. While they use twitter to mainly spread information about various company promotions and events. This works perfectly because they fall in line with the basic them of these Social Networks. For example, facebook is perfect for sharing ideas between friends while twitter is perfect for sharing quick information and running viral campaigns. Starbucks surely understands this and uses both the Social Media Networks accordingly.

The Problem Of Finding The "Non-Followers"

Managing hundreds of thousands of comments in various Social Networks can become an involving activity. Due to this many companies end up just barely managing their own company pages and Social Media accounts. There are hardly any good solutions available right now that allow companies look around in other forums and groups in various Social Networks where people might be talking about anything negative about the company. In essence, the problem of managing the followers is so involving to solve that companies hardly get a chance to follow what the "non-followers" are saying about them. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions available to solve this problem. My best advise to solve this problem is to perhaps provide incentives to your "followers" so that if they find something negative going on about your company, they can be rewarded to inform you about such instances.

The Problem Of "Consolidated Reporting"

Twitter sends out a notification whenever a new person starts following you. facebook sends out weekly statistics about your Ad spending. Every Social Media Network has its own reporting mechanism. This creates a very annoying problem of reconciling and consolidating all these reports. As per my knowledge there are no good solutions to solve this problem. Most companies have their own home grown methods to reconcile and consolidate reports. Obviously this comes with its own associated costs and the problem of keeping up with ever changing reporting formats. Perhaps all Social Media Networks should come up with a common reporting format so that consolidated reporting solutions can be built on top of that.

These are obviously some of the problems of Social Media Marketing. What are your thoughts?

--
I wish it were as easy as taking the best books in sales and
marketing, and just simply blend them together to come up
with something that would really get me the results.
--

What Smarketing Really Is?

Smarketing simply means a way to align your sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. This term is relatively new in the Industry. So new that I thought I came up with it while writing this blog! Then I started looking up on the Internet and found that the guys at Hubspot say that it was actually coined by Dan Tyre in around 2007. However I couldn't find much material from Dan on this topic. Perhaps he shared the thoughts with Hubspot folks at some meetup. So I followed up with Dan himself and got this information from him: "Mike Volpe and I coined the term in 2007 to explain how sales & marketing departments are really archiac holdovers from an earlier age and how HubSpot would be different." Thank You Dan!

In a nutshell, this is what I think it is: Alignment of sales and marketing efforts in order to make them more effective. So let's carry on with that.

When Do You Know You Need Smarketing?

Well the answer really is that you need it almost every time. But still, let's take a few examples.

Let's take some real life examples. So you came up with a great email marketing campaign. You got the best template out there and you got the best content and images for your email campaign. But you forgot to put the "sign up" button within the email. Instead you asked users to go to some page and click there to sign up. Guess what, you just ran a perfect marketing campaign but then left the sales folks at the mercy of only those few who would go an extra mile reading all the steps to sign up in your email.

Let's take another real life example. Your marketing team came did a great job attracting lot of people at your booth at the conference that happened last week. But they did a terrible job filtering the leads they captured and now a list of 20,000 contacts is left over at the mercy of sales folks who end up taking a month following up with all those leads. As a result you end up loosing many potential buyers.

What's the learning in both cases? Sales and Marketing teams can't work in solace. They have to work in perfect coherence to be able to generate amazing results.

OK. I Get The Point. How Do I Start?

1. Break the walls between your marketing and sales team. Have them work together. Have marketing plans reviewed by sales and have sales targets reviewed by marketing. It sounds a lot of work and perhaps something that might slow down your progress; but the reality is that these necessary evils are actually going to help you come up with that perfect blend of sales and marketing that works for you. You won't know it until you try!

2. Use technology that simplifies communication and helps easy blending of both the teams in every aspect related to lead generation, lead nurture to customer relationships.

3. Create a culture of respect for each other. Often marketing is considered as coming up with Banner Ads and Catchy Lines while sales is frowned upon as the dirty job of cold calling. Break that culture and make it open enough for both teams to realize the value one provides to the other.

Is smarketing for you? What do you think?

OK so you have put together a brilliant team of techie folks who have huddled together and turned your great idea into reality. But when it comes to going out there and selling it, you realize how hard it is to make even a single sale. You think that the idea is so cool that it should sell all by itself! As every day passes by you start to realize how difficult it is to sell even the most brilliant idea; and you start envying those crappy products that make no sense to you but are supposedly selling just great!

That’s when you sit back and think what’s missing. Yes if you have been there, or are there, you know what I am talking about. I am talking about “The Marketing Plan”. OK, so now you know what’s missing. What have you done to solve this problem? Perhaps start coming up with a marketing plan; talk with few marketing agencies in your area? Or check out what has worked in the past.