Optimize Your Website For The Search Engines & For Sales

85% of business buyers go to search engines to find vendors when they don’t have a preferred source, so it’s absolutely critical that you have an online presence and that you are well optimized with your website so that when people type in keywords related to your product or service you come up at the top of the search engine, whether it be MSN, Google or Yahoo. From there once a person who’s searching for your product or service clicks through to your website, what do they find? Do they find a nice “about us” page, or a pretty picture of your company? Or do they find readily engaging tools, free guides and offers that compel them to actually click on an offer and fill out a form and convert themselves into a sales lead.

Companies that are building websites without thinking about optimizing them for the search engines and without thinking about optimizing them for conversion of sales leads are entirely missing the boat. If your company is in the process of building a new website or redesigning its website and it’s not considering search engine optimization and developing great offers and conversion mechanisms in calls to action on its website, my suggestion is don’t waste your money. It’s not enough today to just have a nice piece of brochure-ware that does nothing. Companies that are really winning with their marketing expenses as it relates to web presence are the ones that understand the power of internet marketing and are turning their websites into workhorses for sales.

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B to B Websites Need To Be Online Sales Tools

In today’s day and age just about every company has to have a website. It’s widely accepted that if your company doesn’t have a website, it’s not considered credible in its market. Yet how many companies actually consider their website to be truly an online sales tool? In fact most companies spend a lot of money to design and build fancy websites but they neglect to think of how they’re going to turn the website into a work horse for generating leads and online sales opportunities for their company.

Most business owners and executives don’t understand that even if they’re not engaged in selling a product through an e-commerce system, there’s still a great vast opportunity to increase their lead generation through guerilla marketing techniques related to internet marketing. And the core competencies in that area are performing good search engine optimization and having strong pay per click advertising campaigns that are focusing in your core markets.

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The Problem With "Deworsification"

Focus your business, focus your marketing. Back in the 80’s, Peter Lynch, the once famous fund manager for Fidelity Investments Magellan Fund, wrote a book called “One Up On Wall Street”. The book is about how great companies build themselves and how to pick great companies as an investor. One of the chapters in his book is called “Deworsification”. Companies that decide that because they’re good at one thing, they can do all things well and they get beyond their core competencies.

Question I have is, is your company engaged in deworsification behavior? Companies that stay focused on their core competencies and core markets are the ones that over time have the best chance of winning. First of all, focus all of your internal corporate resources on building a sustainable competitive advantage in your core markets. Some businesses decide to venture into new markets and into new customer bases even though it has a tendency to dilute their efforts and can actually make it harder for them to compete, even in their core markets. We see many different examples where a company has started in one business, they have decided to sell their products into different markets, and not recognizing the expense associated with building brand awareness, building channels and actually driving sales into multiple markets at the same time.

So, if your company has over-extended itself by trying to sell products and services into too many markets at the same time, it’s time to rethink that strategy and stop deworsifiying and re-focus your efforts on selling more products and services into your core markets and core customer bases. A better strategy instead of deworsification is to find a way to add more services and more products onto sales into your current markets; that is a much more smart approach from a strategic marketing standpoint.

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What A Marketing Assessment Entails

They can do a six or eight point assessment of your marketing programs including how well you are addressing your target audience and how effective your messaging is. They can also measure the effectiveness of your lead generation programs, and your marketing mix. For a few thousand dollars it could be money very well spent in order to step outside the box and look at what you can do different in order to generate increased effectiveness from your marketing.

The rules of marketing are changing constantly, and companies that are staying on top of those changes are the ones who are increasingly using new techniques in order to boost their lead generation and their penetration of their target markets. Companies that are engaged in old entrenched thinking, using the same methods that they’ve always used in the past are finding that they’re getting less and less return on investment from those efforts. If you haven’t done this for some time, I would suggest that you do a self assessment, or better yet bring in a marketing consulting firm that can help you to take an objective look at what you’re doing wrong, and what you’re doing right and what can be improved.

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Marketing Assessments Are Wise Investments

What when was the last time that you took a hard look at the effectiveness of your marketing programs and decided whether or not you were really getting a good return on investments from these efforts. Lots of companies develop habits on how they spend their marketing dollars, and since we’re all creatures of habit, it’s really easy to be comfortable with doing the same thing over and over and over again. Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again, expecting a different result. The question I have for you is as follows: What is your company doing to measure its marketing results and objectively assess whether or not you’re getting what you’re paying for from them?

Doing a marketing assessment using an outside consulting firm is an easy way to get a quick snapshot and some objective feedback on whether or not your marketing is actually achieving its desired results. My suggestion is if you haven’t done this for some time, hire a strategic or marketing communications consulting firm to come in and help you do a quick and easy assessment. It doesn’t cost a lot of money, and it’s definitely worth your time and effort to use an outside firm.

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Non-Salespeople Shouldn't Hire Salespeople

So one of the key attributes that I’ve found amongst companies that have a hard time hiring sales people is that the hiring manager or the CEO of the company often times has an engineering operations or finance background and without any sales experience themselves, they have a real hard time judging what makes a good sales person and what doesn’t as they go through the recruiting and interviewing process. If you are an executive with a non-sales background and you’re called upon to try to accelerate your company’s sales and take over the management of the hiring of key sales people, you might be prone to this kind of mistake. It might be wise to bring in outside recruiting expertise in order to help improve your hiring and reduce your risk of making mis-hires.

Companies that outsource their hiring function can have a dramatic impact on their top line performance because they’re going to leave the hiring of sales people to the experts and as a result, it becomes easier to bring in "A" players and "A" talent into their company. . Yes. you’ll have to pay some fees along the way in order to bring in that expertise but when you compare the amount you’re going to pay in relationship to the amount you’re going to gain, the return on investment from that expense is well justified. We know countless CEO’s who’ve gone through that discovery process themselves, who can testify that it really pays to bring in the right experts to do sales recruiting correctly.
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How To Stop Sales Mis-hires

Just yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a very seasoned CEO of a technology service provider who came to us in order to do a recruiting project for a new sales person. He came to us is because he’s gone through four sales hires on his own and none of them have actually produced anything for his company. As we sat down to talk about this he sheepishly admitted that this had cost him millions of dollars of lost revenue and opportunity cost as a result of not getting the sales hiring process right.

This week I also had the opportunity to teach a course to a group of CEO’s on how to improve their sales hiring process in order to avoid mis-hires. Of the fifteen CEO’s in the room, when I asked how many of them had consistently had problems in making the wrong hiring decisions on sales people, three quarters of them raised their hands. We talked about the impact of those mis-hires on their businesses, and as we went around the room we realized that millions and millions of dollars had been lost as a result of not bringing in (or not having) the right expertise to do sales recruiting within their companies.



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How Companies Can Stop Sales Leakage

Here are a couple of quick ideas on how you can stop the leakage of sales leads in your pipeline. First, if your sales people are complaining that your leads are of poor quality, find another way to qualify those leads and nurture those leads before you hand them off to the sales team. Most companies use inside lead qualifications specialists who are telesales or telemarketing professionals to do this function. Best-in-class companies realize that the sales leads often times need to be further qualified and nurtured before they’re handed off to field sales teams…otherwise sales people won’t work on them because they don’t believe that they’re of good enough quality. The telemarketing or inside lead qualification function is a very important one if you are to patch the hole and stop the leakage of sales leads between marketing and sales.

Another thing you can do is to add sales lead follow up as key criteria in your performance management system and metrics for measuring and rewarding your sales people. With today’s CRM systems, it’s easy to be able to track whether or not your sales people are actually following up on leads that are passed to them by marketing; with a quick click of a button you can easily see whether those leads are actually being touched and what the lead disposition is. Hold salespeople accountable for making sure that they’re constantly following up on those leads. If you bring lead follow up into the mix of key measurement criteria and you tie their incentives to the performance of that function, you’ll find out how quickly they actually change their attitude and start following up on every sales lead that’s passed to them. These are just a couple of ideas about how to stop sales lead leakage in your organization.

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Stop Sales Leakage Now!

Most companies have the classic problem of spending money on the marketing side of the fence in order to generate leads only to see that those leads are not followed up effectively by the sales team. This classic leakage leads to unnecessary expense and definitely inhibits a company’s ability to accelerate its sales.

If your company is experiencing this problem, there is a solution--it’s quite easy for you to reengineer your marketing and sales process and connect the dots so that you don’t have any discontinuity between the functions that are generating leads and those who are supposed to follow up on them.

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The Fractional Sales & Marketing Solution

Many companies are now looking to employ sales or marketing specialists on a fractional basis. And so the term “fractional management” is becoming more common as part of the business lexicon as companies as they think about how to make sure they have got the right skill mix in their company without necessarily having to employ those resources full time. Another perfect example of outsourcing is when companies need to do a product launch, or they need to perform product management duties but they can’t afford to have a full time product manager costing seventy or eighty thousand dollars a year. A great solution to that problem is employing a fractional product manager for perhaps one quarter or one fifth of that cost and to make sure that vital product management duties are getting done inside the company.

These are just some of the examples of how companies can use fractional sales and marketing management and specialty skills to make sure they have a complete capability inside their company without spending on individual full time equivalents (or FTE’s) in order to have those capabilities in their company. As virtualization of companies continue, we see that this trend is going to continue to accelerate and Cube Management is optimally positioned to provide those fractional sales and marketing management services to companies that need them.

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The Age Of Outsourcing

In today’s day and age, companies can ill afford to take on full-time equivalent employees to manage functions which can be easily outsourced. In fact most businesses today, particularly in marketing, can not afford to keep a large marketing staff, but they still need to complete those vital marketing functions. Companies are going to a much more virtualized model and the fundamental relationship between employees and employer has changed. Companies are often using a make or buy criteria to decide what they outsource to other companies, and what are core competencies that they need to retain inside their own walls with their own employees.

The trend is towards strong rethinking of maintaining a large headcount in the face of stiffer competition, tightened margins and higher specialization of particular skills that are required in order to be effective in the sales and marketing arena. This is where a relationship with an outsourcing company becomes valuable. Today, most companies can’t keep positions like product marketing managers or product managers full time or they can’t afford to have a full-time person doing search engine optimization on their staff, but they still need access to those functions. Obtaining those functions from an outsourcing or inter-management company like ours is a perfect solution.

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How To Best Network Within Your Own Network

Here are a couple of ideas about how to overcome that: First of all, make sure to take time to explain to people and update them about what’s going on in your company. Give them the elevator pitch about your company without spending a lot of time just talking about yourself. Also, when you meet friends or business associates for breakfast, ask them to give you their elevator pitch and a quick update on their business, its size, the kind of work that it does, who its customers are, etc. You’ll be amazed at how that can lead to discussions of either opportunities for doing work together or making vital introductions to each other and referrals.

Also, make sure to keep your friends and business associates and network associates on your mailing lists so that when you’re doing email campaigns and other types of updates on your company’s products and services, they are kept up-to-date on what your company is doing, as well.

Finally, make sure that you give them a copy of your business card and encourage them to visit your website to get information about your company. You’ll discover that a lot of people who've known you for a long time haven’t been to your company’s website and don’t have a current understanding of what your company does, which limits their ability to give or refer business to you.

By just practicing these simple principles, you should be able to get a lot more referrals and a lot more business opportunities without a lot more effort.

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The Effectiveness of Stay-In-Touch Marketing

Do you take for granted the fact that your friends and colleagues and associates in the business community around you know what your company really does? I certainly have in the past, and every day I’m amazed by how little people actually know about my company, Cube Management, and what we actually do.

Just this morning I was having breakfast with a long-term associate of mine and we were talking personally about our work and our personal life, etc, whengot into a discussion about our businesses and quickly realized how little we knew about each other's companies. Before I knew it, we were talking about doing business together. Specifically, this individual has a need to recruit a marketing person and they had no idea that we were in the business of supplying companies with top talent in sales and marketing.

So a lot of times if we just take the time to make sure our businesses are known by others in our circle of influence, we can get business and referrals, and open up doors to new opportunities that are right within our grasp.

So the question I ask of you is what are you doing to stay in touch with your friends, colleagues, and network associates to make sure they’re aware of what your company does? It’s pretty easy to just neglect this area, and as a result, lose critical opportunities for referrals of business from people that are very close to you.

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Direct Mail Still Works For Lead Generation

You probably wonder why when you go home to your mailbox every day and open it up, there are dozens and dozens of postcards and other direct mail pieces sitting there waiting for you. If you’re like me, you’re probably tired of having to weed through all that junk mail out and drop it straight into the recycling bin before you even get inside the door of your house. Well the cold hard fact is that companies spend a lot of money on direct mail because it works. Direct mail is still a great way to get to specific prospects with a specific offer, and this is no less true in the B to B space than it is in the B to C space.

Companies that put together compelling offers, purchase the proper lists and have a strong letter or piece of ad copy can still generate very respectable response rates from direct mail campaigns. Many companies use that as a tool in order to generate first-level leads into their system that they can then nurture along through email campaigns or telemarketing; they can thenbe qualified through telemarketing.

Other companies use direct mail in order to approach the companies they want to market to and warm them up to sales calls. You can target personalized letters to the executives inside your target prospect company and then follow up with a direct sales phone call. The goal? To set an appointment and get in front of a customer.

Though direct mail still has its place in the overall marketing mix, a lot of people have become disappointed or desensitized to the power of direct mail. But when it’s done right, a combination of a great list, a great offer and great content direct mail can drive new leads into the door and help you to accelerate sales.

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How You Can Optimize E-mail Marketing Results

One idea is to use email marketing to send very targeted offers to segmented populations. Our company is using email marketing to offer free guides and whitepapers to specific prospects that are in a specific segment of our potential target market. This is a great way to distribute information and do lead conversions with some of your best prospects and also stay in front of them on a regular basis without overloading them with information.

Email marketing still has its place in the overall sales and marketing mix. Many companies have become disappointed with the results they’ve gotten from this aspect of their marketing programs. But email marketing, when done properly, remains a viable tool. By using nurture marketing and direct drip campaign techniques, it is possible to use email marketing to improve the overall progression of your prospects until you can convert them into actual customers.

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It's Time To Reposition Your E-mail Marketing Strategy

The bubble has already burst on email marketing as the latest fad for touching lots of customers or lots of prospects at the lowest possible cost. Indeed, over the last few years, many companies have tried and failed at successfully deploying email marketing campaigns to nurture their relationships with their prospects. Yet despite the let down and the disappointment on the part of many executives, email marketing is still is a very effective means of reaching your prospects and staying in touch with them so that when they are ready to buy you can convert them into closed sales.

What we’re finding today is that lots of companies are worried about being accused of being spammers. And so the spam laws have definitely put a damper on people’s perceptions of the power of email marketing. Another factor that tends to lessen the impact of email marketing is the perception that everybody is sending out e-newsletters on all sorts of topics, giving the picture of information overload that is going on in the marketplace.

Indeed, you could subscribe to numerous e-newsletters and end up overloading your inbox with emails of value on all sorts of different topics. Yet, most executives don’t have time to read e-newsletters in detail. So it's time to rethink your email marketing strategy by deciding how your company can actually deploy email marketing without falling into the "spammer" category of being a spammer or providing just another unread newsletter to its prospects.

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Outsourcing The Product Marketing Function

If your company is struggling to come up with the margin dollars to support a full-time product marketing function, you should consider outsourcing that function or bringing in a fractional product marketing manager from a staffing firm or a sales acceleration consulting company. This will allow you to still complete your vital product marketing functions product management functions using fractional resources that cost a lot less than a full-time equivalent. You can still get the critical task done to support sales acceleration.

If your company is thinking about how it can improve the performance and sales of products in the marketplace, throwing more sales resources at the problem is not always the solution. Product marketing seeks to fill the gaps between sales, marketing, customer service, and engineering, allowing companies to push additional revenues from specific product lines that they’re trying to grow.

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Accelerate Sales Through Product Marketing

Many companies short-change themselves when it comes to marketing their products by not developing a proper product marketing function internally. Product marketing is a critical element of a functional organization that positions and promotes products, pushes them into the market place, and funnels them into the channels that you’re trying to develop. Without proper product marketing, many companies actually expend needless sales and support resources to try to makeup for the shortcomings of not having this function inside their company.

A lot of companies during the slowdown years of 1999, 2000 and 2001 decided to start cutting marketing staff functions. Product marketing and product management were two areas that were furloughed or greatly cut back as companies tried to limit staff expenses in the sales and marketing area. Now that companies are getting healthier and the economy is strong again, some businesses are hesitant to replace those people… but they still need to do good product marketing whether it be for managing the existing products or for launching new ones.

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How Best To Deploy Telesales Within Your Organization

If you’re thinking about deploying a field sales function or adding to your field sales force, think first about how you can use inside sales or telemarketing to boost your sales efficiency at a lower level of cost. Once you’ve decided to deploy inside or telemarketing sales professionals, it’s really critical that you bring in the right outside consulting or outsourcing capabilities to set up the function in the absence of having your own experience in this area. An outsourced telesales or pipeline development consultant can bring you a myriad of experience which will have a huge impact on your ability to actually be successful when deploying this capability.

Many companies have tried and failed at telesales and telemarketing efforts because they lack the experience and the management acumen to fine tune telemarketing and telesales programs for success. It’s absolutely critical that you think about acquiring the management skill that goes with hiring the bodies to actually do the phone work. A good telesales and telemarketing professional or consultant will come in and help you determine the message, the approach, the target, the unique selling proposition, the call flow and the script all of which are essential elements to be used in order to train your telesales and telemarketing individuals.

A good consultant also will help you recruit and hire the best telesales and telemarketing professionals for your company…which is not an easy task because there are many people who are not capable of this kind of job. If you’re considering deploying additional sales resources, think about telesales and telemarketing and then bring in an outside resource to help you with that goal.

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Telemarketing & Telesales: The Secret Weapon

Many companies laugh off the idea of using inside sales or telemarketing professionals in order to generate leads or close business over the phone. Yet the biggest companies and the best-in-class firms across just about every industry are using that as part of their arsenal in order to accelerate their sales and drive their growth. It’s a lot more efficient to deploy inside sales people and telemarketing professionals than it is to use outside field sales professionals for the same function.

Often, there’s a big gap between marketing and lead generation programs and field sales people that can only be filled by inside sales or telemarketing professionals. Companies use telesales & telemarketing in a variety of ways: Perhaps, they are doing lead generation qualification or they’re following up on leads that are coming from marketing programs. Or, they are actually performing inside sales functions and closing deals over the phone. There’s also a hybrid model which is commonly used by companies to qualify opportunities, close deals that can be done over the phone, and then pass larger relationship-based sales opportunities out to the field sales force.

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