Never Ending Thoughts…

As a sales manager one of the activities that you’d be spending more time on anything (other than making lot of sales calls) is writing a bid proposal. Bid Proposals are like a shot in the dark with lot of unknowns of how the client is going to react when he/she sees the overall bid. Most of the times, as they say, “first impression is the last impression”, works really well when it comes to bid proposals. In this article we will discuss some of the key aspects of writing a winning bid proposal.

Start with an Introductory Note

The proposal must always have a quick introductory note. It should be as simple as 4 lines cover letter. Think of it from the client’s perspective. The client would have probably got 100s of such proposals. They need to be able to quickly identify your contract and put it at the top of the stack. The only best way to do this is to write a very precise opening note or an introductory note that talks about what your intention is as part of the proposal.

I generally use a template that I have perfected over time. It works great for me but then again every business is unique so there’s no point sharing my exact template. What works for me might not work for you. But the concept should and it will. Always have an introductory note in your bid proposal.

The Value of Executive Summary

Many sales managers forget the value that an executive summary provides. If you haven’t written one, you’d only know once you write one! Although an Executive Summary might not always add any direct value to your overall bid proposal, just the act of you spending time on trying to understanding the overall landscape and coming up with a good Executive Summary will give you a very good picture of what the client wants and where he’s coming from. This will help you write a very solid action plan as part of your bid proposal. Keep in mind that you need to be able to convince the client that you have been round the same block a couple of times from where your client is. You need to build a trust that you understand the market and client’s needs. You will only understand this and make your client know about the same by writing a good executive summary.

For small / mid sized projects I try to keep the Executive Summary limited to two or three paragraphs so that they fit in one page. And by “fitting in” I don’t mean playing around with fonts. I use the standard 11pt font with 1.5 line spacing. That makes the proposal very clean and clear. It leaves enough room to be able to clearly highlight important things that I want to call out in my proposal and it gives an overall very clean look.

A Clear Action Plan

Now comes the most important section of your bid proposal. If any section would be discussed over and over again if at all you manage to attract your client by the first two pages is this section. Here you need to clearly call out how you’ll help the client achieve the goals. How much time it would take and how much it would cost. Remember that since this is just a bid proposal and not a final Statement Of Work (SOW), you don’t have to be extremely detailed. However you do need to back your estimates against some legitimate basis. Sometimes it’s based on the overall man power it would take to complete the project, sometimes based on the time and complexity and number of deliverable action items, etc.

Again, in small / mid sized proposals, I try to keep this part within one page. If I do need to take more space I generally attach supporting documents as part of the appendix instead of crushing everything within one page or creating a huge 5-6 page action plan.

You have to keep in mind that the aim of the bid proposal is for you to be able to build a good trust between yourself and the client. You can (and will need to) be as elaborate after the client has talked with you and gone over the proposal. After doing that the base estimates might shift here or there by a bit. That’s almost always understandable. But if you will call out all the details at first, it won’t add much value because the fact is that most bid proposals are written based on very little information from the client. Unless you have all the information, you won’t be able to write a detailed plan anyways, so why spend time assuming too many thing?

The Next Steps Section

This is the last section in my bid proposal. In this section I give some details about how to follow up with me and set up a meeting to go over the bid proposal. The idea here is that you don’t want to leave the bid open ended. You want the other party to show interest and give you a call if they have questions. Remember that people only ask a question if you ask them to ask a question! If you don’t, they will most probably move on. There’s nothing wrong about it. Think of from their perspective. You have to make the proposal as interactive as possible and leave enough information so that the client understands and sees value in your offer but at the same time has some key questions that will help you show case your product or service in more detail. This way you can have an absolute shot of winning the project.

A balanced bid proposal with just enough information is always welcome and liked by the clients; and will most certainly increase your chances of winning the bid because it will set the right stage to start with. Would you like to share what has worked for you?

Internet is the largest source of contact addresses on the Planet. You can find emails, phone numbers and addresses of individuals, small, medium and large businesses, government agencies, lawyers and just about anyone. And so it has become one of the best sources for Lead Generation. However, not every company has been successful when it comes to generating leads from the Internet. So what are the best practices for Internet based Lead Generation?

Use Ethical Means of Lead Generation

With so much data so easily available on the Internet, often many people don’t realize when they have crossed the line when it comes to searching for contact addresses. Only use legitimate and ethical processes. For example only use services and methods that can provide you the information based on whatever is publicly available anyways. There are lot of spiders and screen scrapers out there that fetch contacts from craigslist using your login Id and password. They all are wrong methods. Do not use any service that asks you to provide your login Id and password for craigslist, facebook and so on.

Manually Validate Leads

Once you have found the leads your self or used a company to do that for you, the next step really should be to make sure that the leads have been manually validated for correctness. So much more data gets added to the Internet on daily basis that it becomes stale very soon. Only choose Lead Generation Vendors who spend time in manually validating each lead before they hand over the information to you. You will be surprised how much bad and incorrect data is available out there on the Internet. When paying for generating leads on per lead basis, you shouldn’t definitely be paying for leads that don’t even exist!

Every Lead is a “Person” DO NOT SPAM

Remember that every lead is a “person”. Do not SPAM. Not only will you fall into trouble by getting your IP blocked by your ISP, you will easily gain lot of bad name in your Industry. Remember that bad news spreads faster and you certainly don’t want to be part of it. Go for a Lead Generation Company that not only provides you the lead’s contact information, but also some more extra information, for example perhaps their business home page, blog, or some article or book, or any other artifact that you can read and get some background about the lead before you email or contact them by phone. This way you will not only save yourself from being called a spammer you will also get far better conversion rate.

Look for Targeted Leads

There are just so many contacts that you can harvest from the Internet that there is often a chance that you will end up contacting leads that have nothing to do with what you are trying to serve. That’s called bad quality leads. Work with a Company that can provide you extremely targeted leads. Most of the companies using Internet as the means of lead generation are based on opt-in databases and have very few categorization of leads. That can create problems because you are never sure if you are going to get the kind of extremely targeted leads that you are looking for. Look out for products like ellipsis dive! that are built on top of Internet Search Engines and generate leads based on keywords and not categories.

Analyze Your Entire Sales Process

Lead Generation is only the first step towards a successful sales cycle. There’s a lot that goes after that including lead nurture, lead scoring and so on. The more complex your sales cycle is the more important it becomes as to how you follow up and convert that lead. Many Lead Generation companies stop at the point where they generate leads. Beyond that it’s pretty much falls on you as to how you are going to handle the lead. Work with a company that can work with you and understand and analyze your entire sales process, and really work with you hand in hand to not only provide the kind of leads you are looking for, but also integrate with your CRM and help you get the maximum out of the generated leads. Have a holistic approach and understand where the bottlenecks are. Fix the Entire Sales Process if that’s what it takes.

In the end, the best practices of lead generation really fall into being able to access the overall sales cycle and finding potential areas of improvement. Choosing the right lead generation vendor is only the very first part of it. What do you think?

Entrepreneurs around the World are faced with more challenges than most people are in their day to day lives. Extremely dynamic situations, extremely low funds, extremely hard deadlines, and many more of such constraints are common and something that every entrepreneur has to face without much choice. In this article we will cover some of the key tools that have turned out to be really useful for most of the entrepreneurs out there. If used in coherence, together these tools and techniques act as a life saver swiss army knife for the entrepreneur who’s struggling to prevail in the jungle.

Reliable Website Hosting Vendor

Whether your business is software or Internet related or not, in today’s World, you will most certainly need a website. Your website will not only help you reach out to a much larger audience in lesser time than with any other medium. Your success with your Website depends on how reliable your hosting vendor is. Our suggestion is to go with a dependable hosting vendor. You won’t know all the nuances of working with a Website Hosting Vendor until you actually deal with one. And the fact is that almost every vendor out there has their pros and cons. So you will have to be really diligent and keep evaluating your vendor on all the aspects that you’d need in future. Moving from one vendor to the other becomes really painful task, the later you do it, and the more features you have to migrate, the more painful it becomes. So do a pilot test and test out all the possible features you’d need few months down the line before you sign a long term contract with your hosting vendor.

A Toll Free Business Phone Number

You will very soon realize that you cannot use your personal phone for all the calls you’ll need to handle for your business. Having a Toll Free Business Phone Number is another thing in line that will boost your business more than you can imagine. A Toll Free Number (and even better a “Vanity Number”) adds a kind of surety in the eyes of the caller (or the prospective customer) that you mean “business” and care about the people who call for business purpose.

A PO Box

If you are starting out right from your home or garage like most entrepreneurs do, this is something that you will find really useful to have. There will be many times when you’ll need to receive business mail and it’s always a better to have a PO Box for all such mails. It also helps not only to keep your business mail separate from your personal mails, it also is considered a more professional way to work because the sender knows that he/she sending a business mail to a business PO Box and not to someone’s home address.

A Good Lead Generation System

Once you have come up with a product or a service, the next major step is to actually find customers and sell your product! This is the most important part of your business, hands down. Not being able to find enough customers and traction in time is the most common and most well known reason of why small businesses fail within the first few years of their inception. A good lead generation system is more desperately needed by a company during the start up phase than during any other phase of the company. Especially because you are running with limited funds, you need to be able to find a lead generation vendor that understands the needs and limitations of not only a small business, but a start up business. There are a lot of small businesses out there which have been successfully running for years. They don’t necessarily fall in the category of “start up”. A start up has a bigger challenge at hand. It’s not only small, but also it needs to prove itself out there against all the competition. A good lead generation system will help you find the leads that you need to grow your businesses and will help you leverage all the features provided by the system as you grow, and when you need it.

A Good Advertising System

No matter what kind of business you are in, you will need to find a way to effective and affordable way to advertise it. One of the biggest challenge in this area is that there are just so many ways to advertise that many entrepreneurs fail to choose the right one more often than you can imagine. You can advertise in magazines, yellow pages, you can advertise on radio, advertise on television, you can sponsor events, advertise in conferences, buy pay-per-click advertising on the Internet and so on. The biggest challenge is to understand what kind of business and what kind of market you are in and where your potential customers are. Since you are running on limited funds and are very new to market, you need to find out that particular niche of people who would be interested in trying out your product and not only will they be willing to try out, you need to make sure that you will be able help them out. Remember that these very first set of customers are the ones who will provide good feedback about your business and will help you grow. So a good advertising system for you is the one that helps you not only get exposure at an affordable price, but also helps you reach out to really focused clientele.

If you have ventured into a start up you will most certainly be able to relate to all these things. And more than that, we are sure you’ll have more to share! If so, please do not hesitate and let us know what you used or are still using to grow your start up.

If you want to increase sales revenue, the one thing that you need to do is generate sales leads online. This is one of the most basic principles that govern lead management. We all know how hard is to generate steady revenue these days. Some may also say that it is almost impossible to be profitable in these recession timeframe that the world is passing by. In order to be successful, an entrepreneur must first need to make sure that any move requires a consistent flow of leads.

However, what are leads? Well, leads are the actual clients, customers that your business generates after its business activity. They are also called prospective customers, mostly because they are not yet persons who have already been clients, but are somehow interested in buying those kinds of products that your company might have on stock. In the case of online businesses the situation is the following one: people that are actually interested in some product find it on search engines (most of the potential clients search on Google), and then decide to check one of the pages that comes up as search engines result. This is why it is important to be on the first page on Google, for example. As an online entrepreneur, you will need to be prepared to satisfy any type of client and customer that might come in your online store. This is one of the rules of Internet Marketing: to not give up, and also prepare to satisfy anyone’s needs regarding a product and service that the client might need.

You can generate more sales by simply being more open minded, however this is not the best tip that we can supply you now. We understand that sometime you as a webmaster and entrepreneur, want to generate more sales than before, and also to behave better than your competitors.

The best way to generate more sales is to put yourself in the prospects’ shoes. This is one of the best methods. It is somehow related to the empathy that we humans have in the relation with other. This represents a key aspect in business because it makes you figure out what the customers need and want.

Read other sales letters in order to have a wider image about what are the other competitors doing. After reading them it would be a great thing to focus on creating slightly better versions of sales letters and improve your online business and marketing skills after learning from others’ mistakes.

Also, it would be a great alternative to do a survey. This is one of the simplest strategies, but it really works. In this way you will know about your visitors and clients interests regarding shopping and other similar aspects. Try to be creative and learn from each day that passes by as an entrepreneur. Also, learn from your mistakes. This is what successful entrepreneurs regularly do. Also, try to place promotions and offers for your visitors and clients. Their needs must be satisfied.

Furthermore, your website will need to have a proper design and the right content too. In conclusion, do not forget about all the small promotions, such as sales letters, press releases and newsletters that determine people to hear about you, your business and websites.

When you are trying to sell a product or a service, there is the potential to get really frustrated due to two things: too many uninterested visitors or too few interested buyers. You might now say that converting visitors into buyers is an art. Yes it is and you are right. However, do not forget about the competition. Almost any product or service in this world has at least one competitor on the market. Only revolutionary products and services are not facing these issues. If your business is not something extraordinary, you must understand the fact that you need to overcome a lot of issues that might appear when trying to sell your products or service.

Sales letters represent good methods of competing with other companies or businesses. Furthermore, sales letters are offering you the opportunity to convince people and businesses to buy your product/service or at least visit your website. Good internet marketers focus a lot on building stable websites that are capable to attract visitors due to two aspects: practicability and user-friendliness. It is pretty interesting to observe the fact that people do not understand too well what the difficulties that online marketers are constantly encountering really are. They are not just handling the brand advertising of the website, but also they work a lot on developing web platforms that are capable to satisfy the web visitors.

In business, everything matters, including how your business looks and is on the Internet. We believe that Internet Marketing is an art and anybody can constantly learn and improve his or her knowledge in how to promote and sell products using the most versatile business environment, the Internet.

Few people really know how to communicate over the Internet. The Internet can be your best friend, but it can also represent one of your worst enemies, mostly because you need to know what you can tell and not when you are online. Currently, there are endless possibilities when it comes to communicating over the ‘net. Some of us still use e-mail as an important communication method, while others use messengers (AIM, Yahoo Messenger, Skype etc.) and even social media services, such as Facebook or Twitter.

Things have changed a lot since the 1990s when we all learned to use e-mails. However, new technology comes with more than just benefits. New online services, such as social media ones imply great risks. It is essential not to share too much personal information with strangers. It is like in the case of real life. You do not want other people to know details about you. There are some details about you that you must share only with close friends and family. However, there are few people who really understand the risks and are careful with this aspect. Few webmasters are responsible enough to think that their online businesses aren’t capable to face any threat. These webmasters are wrong and their thinking is not the proper one.

Do not share too much personal information on the Internet. Online communications can be pretty dangerous. Also, it would be great not to respond to spam or e-mails that could potentially harm your computer or your bank accounts and credit cards (in the case of phishing e-mails).

First of all, try to do it right

E-Mail Marketing is one of the most effective and efficient methods of keeping in touch with former, current and even prospective customers. Most of the websites use this technique in order to transmit their clients the new offers that might catch their attention. What do you do when you want to promote a new product or service? Well, it is pretty simple:

Phase One: You post information on your website about the new product/service promoting its advantages.
Phase Two: Post press releases on third-party websites.
In this case, make sure that you do not advertise too much your products. Press releases are made in order to communicate information. Please avoid terms like “the best” or “most” because press releases are just ways to communicate, NOT advertise. Make sure that you do not create sales letters, instead of press releases.
Phase Three: Design newsletters and send them to your list of clients.

Meantime, you will need (as an entrepreneur) to find ways to generate leads. Lead generation represents an important part of the mechanism. So, it is important to gather e-mail addresses of people who are really interested about your products or services or even related to your niche.

Business owners can be usually assigned to two distinct categories: they are either too shy to send promotional e-mails to former clients or there are some entrepreneurs who send a lot of e-mails to their customers and are considered as spammers. Do not send the same newsletter twice. This will most certainly considered as spam. Promotional e-mail writing is something that can be done only by a professional, in order to be effective. Don’t be so sure that you can write your own press releases. You will always be too attached to your brand or business and will not present the things as they are.

Do not feel shy to ask questions in order to develop your business online. Feel free to participate at any conferences and learn new business tricks. You will need to know a lot of thing in order to make your business to survive online. Think about the fact that you are in competition with another 10, 100 or 1000 web-based businesses which have the same domain of activity as yours.

The business and marketing tactics of lead generation have pretty much got standardized over the past few years. Numerous companies have mushroomed in this field all providing leads based on one simple formula – “landing pages“. Most of the lead generation companies do quite well when it comes to finding leads for their clients. But then not all the clients are able to get good conversion rates. The blame game starts and goes all the way back to the source – the lead generation company. In this article we will discuss some of the things that you can do to successfully convert the leads you bought into customers.

Every Lead is different. Personalize Your Pitch.

Let’s say you sell restaurant supplies and you purchased 100 restaurant owners leads from ellipsis dive!. As a leads provider, ellipsis dive! (and many other lead generation companies) not only give you the name of the lead, but full contact address, alternate phone numbers, website URL and so forth. If you just publish a “marketing email” to all these leads, we all know what’s going to happen; You are going to be labeled as a spammer! Instead, utilize all the information that the lead generation company gave you. You purchased it! So use it to your best! Go through every lead one by one and see what they do and see how can you help them. Send them a personal note. Let’s say one of the leads is actually a pizza restaurant so you might want to write about some specific deal you could provide related to pizza stones, and so forth. People are ready to listen if they get really focused and personalized message. Sending such personalized marketing pitch would increase your chances of lead conversion by four times!

Ask for what they want before you give them what you’ve got!

The more you learn about “sales and marketing” the more you’ll realize how much important it is to listen to your leads. What differentiates successful sales representatives from others is their ability to carefully listen to their leads and map their requirements to the product they are selling. Before directly jumping in and selling your product, ask your leads what they want. You will be surprised how much open people are if someone really wants to listen to their problems. No business if perfect and error free. In our above restaurant leads example, your first contact (via phone or email) could be as simple as “hey I got your contact from your website and I’d like to know what kind of methods you use to provide bulk pizza orders?”. You could then understand your leads pains when it comes to making pizzas on bulk orders and offer them appropriate tools in your next follow up conversation. People buy product more easily once they know why exactly they are buying it for!

Selling is sometimes a “two way street”. Be open for a “give-n-take” route.

Business is not just about selling your product. Many times it’s about taking something in return than just money! For example, you might end up getting in touch with a portal that connects various restaurateurs via a Social Network or a Blog. You might want to place your advertisement on their network for exchange of more restaurant leads that you can then use to sell your restaurant products! A similar common practice is called “link exchange” but you can extend that concept to “barter” almost anything that creates a win-win situation for both the parties!

So you can see; once you have purchased the leads, the story just doesn’t end there. In fact that’s where it starts! It all depends on how well you follow up and engage your leads. So next time when you open your wallet and purchase leads, do some good justice utilizing all that the lead generation company provides you. And you will see far better lead conversion rates than ever before!

Growing business and getting a steady stream of new customers has become the most challenging task in this down economy. Businesses are looking out for newer ways to attract attention, be it trying to increase presence in various Social Networks, Affiliate Marketing or Blogging. In this article, we will discuss how you can grow your business using one more technology streams – the Mobile Applications World. We’ll take iPhones as example, but the same techniques can be used on Android Phones or any Mobile Device.

Mobile Networks and Phones are becoming more tuned to supporting rich media and dynamic and focused content. The innovation done in mobile market in the past decade has made it possible to merge the Internet and the Mobile worlds into one in more seamless fashion than it was ever imaginable. However this is just a start. “Mobile Applications” have just sprung up and are poised to spread to all market niches in the coming years.

Here are some of the ways you can use to reach out to Mobile Savvy customers and increase your customer base. Just like any solution that will make a good impression in increasing your business, it’s not going to be easy and it’s going to take a few months to mature. In addition, it’s a step-by-step approach.

Start with a “.mobi” version of your Website

.mobi is the most common root level domain for mobile websites. You should first start securing the .mobi domain of your website. If you are selling eBooks or T-shirts, start with making a light weight version of your site that would work well on mobile devices. This means having very light weight java scripts and judicious use of HTML stylesheets etc. It will take a few weeks to a month to make a good SEO friendly .mobi site.

Make your “Checkout Process” Simple

Your chances of having someone pull out his/her credit card and buy something from your Website grow exponentially if you have a secure and simple checkout process. The more forms and irrelevant information you are going to capture, the more are going to be the chances of the user leaving the checkout process in the middle of it and look out for alternative website. Avoid asking for sign-ups to your other newsletters and services. You can definitely send out a mail later on talking about all the promotions and stuff. Keep the checkout process as simple and quick as possible. Ask your customers about checkout experience and fix the glitches as soon as possible.

Provide an “iPhone” or “Android” version of your Checkout Process

Once you have a clean and simple checkout process, it’s time to integrate your current business with an iPhone or Android App. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you have a website to sell T-Shirts. One of the best ways of making a seamless checkout process via an iPhone App can be to leverage existing financial applications available over iPhones to help the user make the purchase process seamless. For example, if the user already has access to their credit card information via iPhone (via a credit card application), all you need to do is have the user authorize use of his/her credit card via that already authenticated application. This will not only help the customer build trust in your Application, it will also make the process more streamlined.

Keep in mind that it does take a few iterations before you have mastered all the above steps. Keep your customers in loop regarding all these new features and ask for feedback. No one else can tell you how good or bad your checkout process is other than your own customers! You will notice as you venture deeper into the mobile applications world, more and more people are going to use your application and there you’ll have it – an altogether new channel of bringing in more customers and business!