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!

--
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.

But here’s the interesting problem. A marketing plan that worked in the past for some company that’s doing something similar to what you are doing, might not, and most probably will not work for you! What will make you crazy is the outrageous money you are going to spend in coming up with “that perfect marketing plan”; and to your surprise it won’t give the kind of results you were looking for! As long as your marketing efforts don’t recoil back and hit your image (God that would be a mess), you should take it positively and learn from it.

So how do you solve this problem? Well, the real answer to be frank is that you don’t solve it! You just don’t take it as a problem and don’t try to solve it! In other words, think outside the box. Think about who is going to use your product and how. Remember that story of a boy who, when asked about the benefits of a news paper, told that you can make a boat, a hat and a frog out of it?

A marketing plan doesn’t have to make sense to start with. Many great marketing plans evolve just like a great solution does. A great marketing plan is one that changes with time and morphs itself into what clings on in people’s minds. It might not make sense to start with, but eventually it will.

That doesn’t mean that if your plan it completely outrageous and bold it is going to be a definite hit! What it means is that dare to think outside the box. And try it out on a small scale to test the waters so to say. Don’t throw your current idea down the drain. A great marketing plan always morphs. If you completely change it you are throwing out a message “I messed up” or even worst “I didn’t know what the heck I was doing”. That’s one message you shouldn’t be conveying. A morphing message would convey “Hey what I wanted to say means this too!”.

Have you tried to go out of the box and came up with a marketing plan that didn’t make sense but then eventually took off and everyone said “I kind of knew it’s going to rock the first time you told me…”.

Happy Marketing!

After three attempts, and self learning, I seemed to have found the Twitter Recipe that works for me. And I am going to share some of it with you today. I could have shared it all but then, to be frank, most of it is philosophy; and will perhaps take lot of time and wine sessions to fully throw over the table.

Twitter has definitely proven to be a true viral news platform. The 140 characters limitation enforces the originator of the news to be precise and concise. Sharing the information is as simple as a “one click” re-tweet! I don’t think it can get simpler than that! Anyways; This article is not about what Twitter can and cannot do. It’s about the people who use twitter. It’s about the people like you and me who either follow or have followers and are using Twitter mainly as a channel to spread and share knowledge.

One of the main things that I found on Twitter is that many people just blindly follow. Heck, many “people” on Twitter aren’t even “real people”! Many are just apps and bots that are constantly sniffing for material that their “masters” have programmed them for! When you see 10,000 followers in your Twitter profile and realize that 8000 of them are just apps and bots, believe me the “social” angle just goes down the drain.

So I think what matters on Twitter is not how many people are following you, but rather how many people are you following! When you follow someone or some feed, do you follow it because the material amuses you? gives you peace and harmony? makes you laugh? makes you think? I take Twitter just like any other channel of information. Just like today on my TV I have 100s of channels that I am subscribed to and I watch based on what I want to; I think the same philosophy goes for Twitter.

That brings the discussion to the point that when you follow someone on Twitter, are you really following them to increase your user base hoping that bots and other random people would see that and start following you? Or are you following them because you genuinely like what they say? It might not be the matter of whether or not you actually truly “believe” in what they say; However the question is really about the real reason behind your action of following other people on Twitter.

I believe that once you carefully start looking at it and selectively pick the people and feeds that you believe to some extent and think are useful sources of information, Twitter will be more beneficial for you. Twitter is not about increasing number of followers; It’s about enjoying the information that you love and believe in, and sharing that information with others who you think believe in you and love reading your material!

Or is it just the Friday / Weekend Fever kicking in me? What do you think?

Happy Friday!
GT

Sales Presentations are an inevitable and necessary evil. They become even more important in case of complex sales.You spend hours on making that “one great sales presentation”. However how many times have you found yourself into a situation where you think that there’s something going wrong? You are not able to convey the right message, the audience is not able to visualize what you are saying; or perhaps you left some key points in your presentation that pretty much broke the deal. I don’t think this after reading this article you won’t make such mistakes ever; However I hope that you will make them less frequently.

Out of the many reasons of where and when a sales presentation might fail, I think these three are the most important ones. If you fail to pay attention to these three, you are probably going to fall into hard luck trying to make that deal happen.

1. Sales Process is really a Two Way Street

People have gone into the habit of coming up with “trailer” based presentation. Like TV Ads. They are good to be hosted on the website. But when it comes to giving a face to face presentation, they are probably not the best option to go with. The idea of having a face to face presentation is to meet the client and understand the requirement; The idea is to pretty much “cut through the chase” and listen to the requirements. And the presentation should reflect the same intention. The more interactive you can make the session, the more you’ll be able to understand what’s needed and quickly conclude to next steps.

It’s a good idea to stick to the plan and the overall presentation, but moving here or there a bit is not bad at all. Especially when your audience is showing interest and is engaging in a discussion, it makes perfect sense to keep the synergy going even if it means jumping on the white board and discussing what is important for the customer.

2. There is no “one size fits all” Solution – Customization is the King

I do agree that there are those certain slides and material that you can always re-use. But to be able to really deliver a great sales presentation, I think it should be unique. Every requirement is different and every client loves some level of personal touch. If you have done something similar and want to put that as a reference, that’s definitely a good idea, however keeping the “proposed solution” in line with what the client is asking for is the best strategy. The more “cookie cutter solutions” you fill your presentation with, the more you are calling out for disaster!

3. Respect Every-one’s Time and Set Right Expectations

Last but not the least and I have seen this happening so many times. Sales meetings going out of control and extending beyond the designated duration. Best way to deal with this is to send out agenda and set time slots for each activity (such as introduction, Q&A, etc.). Get a buy in from everyone regarding what makes sense. It’s sometimes better to share the material you are going to present before hand. That helps a lot in getting quick feedback before hand and make changes based on what would make sense for the customers.

In the end, I think sales presentations fail when they forget to address the needs of the customer and instead blindly drop a solution. What do you think?

I have recently read an article written by John Cameron, an expert in business coaching. He is very passionate of what he does and his expertise in the domain of sales and commerce in general is seen now as highly important. In his article, “Dealing with objections”, John Cameron speaks about all the barriers that a sales person faces when trying to contact a potential customer and sell a product or a service. This article has inspired me to post about this subject too and try to find the best methods that might work in the most common situations.

The fact that it is really hard to come up with a universal sales statement when contacting a potential customer is a fact. Nevertheless, it is essential not to come up with a universal sales statement! Why? Well, each customer must be treated in a different manner, because each of them has different interests, education, opinions and has been raised in a different cultural environment or background. A smart sales person must be capable to come up with an appropriate strategy each time a customer is contacted. Still, the sales person must act and react friendly. There might be potential clients that might use “I’m not interested” phrases. Well, this happens in a fairly amount of cases.

The question that is being raised is the following: What to do when a potential customer is not interested in your products or services that you sell? Well, the best manner is to find and present the advantages that the client has at the moment of purchasing. You need to explain the customer what are the advantages of the product or service and how the client can benefit from them. Furthermore, a good sales person reminds of both pros and cons, putting emphasize on the pros of course.

A good sales person must captivate the potential client in the first 10 to 30 seconds of the discussions. Sometimes, it is really hard to do this, but don’t feel discouraged. There is always the chance to improve your technique. Recognize that each client must be approached in a different manner and that might be a step forward. No one has been born as a great sales person. Everyone has learned how to discuss and approach potential clients in both the real world and the online environment. Hope that this article has been interesting for you and helped you in your business.

You can read John Cameron’s article at: http://www.evancarmichael.com/Sales/1971/Dealing-With-Objections.html

How many times have you faced the frustration that you think that you spent all the time on earth preaching and teaching and nurturing a lead, everything moves along rather slowly but steadily and after all the back and forth meetings, and calls, and more meeting, after the back forth finalization of the scope of the project, when it comes to the final invoicing the lead backs off! This is one thing that’s unfortunately hard to teach and so I thought I’ll cover my experience on this topic and perhaps get other people’s input on this.

What are the top three reasons that leads would back off at the last moment?

While it’s really hard to pin point the top three reasons because the reasons can be different based on your product, target market and the size of the leads you are following up with. For example a company doing complex B2B sales lead generation for large clients would face much different problems as compared to a company doing the same job for small / single man companies. However, I believe there are still some commonalities so to speak. I believe the top three are:

a) Not being comfortable with the invoicing cycle

The other party might not be comfortable dealing with a very large number. For example if you were pitching for a year long project that would cost say $12000 and you know your client is a small merchant who probably won’t spend more than $2000 per month, you should then send a recurring invoice of $1000 per month for a year instead of sending an invoice with full amount or even 4 invoices because anything above $1000 will most probably scare the client.

b) Unclear and Conflicting information

Many times it would happen that the sales team would pitch a product as extremely simple with very minimal laws and restrictions involved. However when it comes to invoicing the accounts department would send a long list of “fine print” rules which might just confuse the client further because nothing like this was discussed at earlier stages of the engagement. So as a sales person, try to make sure that you know enough about the your state/country laws and won’t fall into any trouble later.

c) Invoice Slapping

To be frank I’m not even sure if that’s the right term because I have come up with this term just as I am writing this article. The concept here is that many times people invoice the client without a prior notice. This can become a deal breaker especially in larger B2B projects. So you have spent days and may be weeks building a relationship with the client. The last thing you want to do is loose all that effort due to one simple mistake – invoicing. So instead of “slapping” the invoice on your client’s face, ask them when they’ll be comfortable paying for the project and create an invoice accordingly.

While there could be many more reasons why a lead would just simply back off, I think the most valuable outcome of that (if you take it that way) is the amount of learning that you will get trying to understand why they backed off at the first place! This will help you improve your lead nurture processes too. What do you think? How has your experience been as far as invoicing the client for the first time goes?