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prospects Tagged Articles
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Get Referrals – SendOutCards Review
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| My Entrepreneur Tool of the Week this week is SendOutCards. SendOutCards is a powerful marketing service that can help you generate more referrals and keep better relationships with your customer. In under 60 seconds they allow you to send a printed greeting card with your customized message to your customers, prospects, and important contacts. They print it, stuff it, and mail it all for less than a greeting card at the store. I’ve found SendOutCards to be a great way to stay in touch with my contacts and build new referrals from them in a painless way.
Some of the benefits that I’ll touch on in this article include: Getting more referrals, Building lasting relationships, Easily remembering to stay in touch, and Appreciation as the key to success. |
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Client Survey as Marketing Tool
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| A client survey can be an important part of your Marketing Action Plan. By getting a sense of how you’re perceived by your current clients and prospects, you can improve your service and enhance your image in the market. |
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Doing a lot for a little
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| You can do a lot of marketing for a little investment, if you’re ready to do most of the work yourself. |
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Overcoming Doubts - Doing Business
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| Prospects have doubts; they get cold feet. Doubts are barriers to doing business. One of the best uses of your time is removing those barriers. It's a tough job but, in marketing, you've got to do it.
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Emotional Marketing, Part One
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| Emotional Marketing is the most powerful approach to marketing you can imagine. It's about connecting with your prospects where they hurt. They're annoyed; they're anxious or close to rage about something that you can do something about. Emotional marketing, done well, sends a message that validates their feelings. He/she who validates the feelings of another is that person's hero. |
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Twelve Ways to Improve Your Marketing Message
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| Effective marketing writing's a lost art. More and more marketing copy is resorting to hyperbola, factual recitation and self-important puffery. If you want to see how your marketing copy stands up (and sell more as a result), ask yourself the following twelve questions. |
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Probing: Leading and Controlling with Questions
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| What: is a probe
Why: do we use probes
Questions are one of the most powerful weapons in a salesperson’s arsenal of procedures and techniques. Questions require a prospect to participate actively in the sale. Questions help us learn the prospects hidden wants and needs. Questions give us time to gain lost composure.
We must become excellent question askers and effective listeners.
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THE 2nd BIGGEST MARKETING WASTE
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| I will discuss what the 2nd biggest marketing waste is. |
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Franchise Sales are Predictable with a well defined Franchise Sales Process
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| Franchise sales are predictable with a well defined franchise sales process. Franchising companies should have a well defined franchise sales process in place but it is doubtful that many do. Franchisors typically rely on sales pipelines and sales funnels rather than examining the due diligence process of prospects and the interaction with the franchiser. This makes forecasting franchise resources difficult and sales results difficult to manage. |
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Clues to Increase Sales -- Listen to the Buyer
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| Prospects hold the key as to why they'll buy, and you will learn this only if they're talking and you are listening. Buyers will tell how to sell them. The trouble is that sales people are always talking and selling and not listening effectively. How then can the salesperson know what the buyer wants. While prospects want to know about features and advantages, they usually buy benefits. |
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Franchise Sales Success Improves by Using a Franchise Proposal
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| Franchise prospects don’t buy a franchise they buy the benefits of the franchise. The key questions all franchise prospects want answers to are “Who you are, what you do, what makes you different and why consumers do business with you.” A well-crafted franchise sales proposal will clearly articulate these answers. |
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#1 Reason for Network Marketing Success - Part One
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| If your son or daughter decided to walk in your footsteps and own their own network marketing business and you could tell them only one thing to focus on to ensure massive success, what would you tell them? After much heartache, despair, hard-work, and perseverance, I discovered the "secret" (which turns out isn't really a secret at all) as to what that one thing is that separates the top 3% income earners from the other 97%. Find out why the top earners are the ones being chased by prospects and not the other way around. The answer may shock you... |
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Can you Publish an eZine to earn Money ?
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| Basically, all you need to start your own eZine are an auto responder and broadcast feature to go with, enabling you to reach out to your massive subscribers whom you can regard as your prospects, too. |
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Prospects Aren't Really Prospects
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| Sales has a goal: find a prospect with a need and sell a solution. You can call it anything you want, use all of the fancy terms about serving your client, be a Trusted Advisor or a Relationship Manager, do whatever you can to understand need and make nice. But at the end of the day, your job as a seller is to place your solution.
Unfortunately, we do it the long, hard way: we assume - and this is a baseline assumption in the sales industry - that when we notice a ‘need' that our solution can fulfill, we have a prospect. Yet we consistently close 7% of our ‘prospects.' Obviously our assumption that a prospect with a need which our solution can resolve is a specious assumption. |
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6 ways to Generate Leads for Free (which techniques work and which ones don’t)
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| If you are a small business owner your main objective should be building the list of prospects you market to. The more people who are interested and in the know about your product, the more sales you are likely to make. Ideally you would like thousands of visitors to your website weekly. |
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Smart Women Give Their Clients an Experience
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| This article is about how important it is to give your clients a positive experience when they visit you or call upon you about your products and services. Giving your prospects, and existing clients, a positive experience with you will help you to gain their business and also more referrals. |
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Existing Clients Make The Best Prospects
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| Want to make selling easy? Want to increase your number of closed sales, enjoy the selling process and have less stress? Then fill your prospect list with your existing customers. |
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Position, Market, Sell To Turn Your Prospects Into Clients
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| If you want to turn your prospects into customers than you have to do more than sell. In today's competitive environment, image, reputation and perceived value do more to move the sales process forward then just making sales calls. |
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Invest In Yourself! To Turn Your Prospects Into Customers
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| If you want this year to bring significant Return On Investment that the largest investment you need to make is in yourself! |
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Just Do It!
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| If you want to turn your prospects into customers than you have to make the calls. Yes, you heard me, there is no free lunch, no way around it, if you want to be effective at sales then you have to Just Do It! |
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Google AdWords Tricks and Tips - Part 2
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| Create Your Google AdWords Ad
In Part 1 of my series of articles I explained how to Generate your keyword list in 5 simple steps. The next step is to write text to encourage prospects to click on your ad, and when they do, have them land on a page which will maximize your investment.
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How to Generate Leads for Free or Low Cost
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| If you are a small business owner then it is in your best interest to build the list of prospects you market to. The more people know about your product or service, talk about your product or service and generate interest in your product or service, the more sales you are likely to make. Wouldnt it be great to bring thousands of visitors to your website weekly? Heres how to do it.
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A Marketing Cookbook for Entrepreneurs
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| Most entrepreneurs simply don't see marketing as a line item that needs to be taken as seriously as, say, their annual equipment or supply budget, and that's a mistake. In over 20 years of working in this industry, I've confirmed that many entrepreneurs see marketing as an afterthought or a "necessary evil." Worse, many haven't mined the data right in front of them that could give them a blueprint for how to market to their best prospects. |
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The Basis of Sales Has Remained Stagnant
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| Did I get your attention? Good. Because I’m serious.
Most of you would laugh, tell me I’m wrong, that the sales model has been shifting and that the Internet has ‘changed everything.’ But what, exactly, has it changed?
I believe that basically, sales has not changed since the beginning. Sure, the bells and whistles have changed: it’s far, far easier to get leads and interest; it’s much simpler to get your message out; it’s much quicker to find out whatever you need to find out about prospects. It seems to appear as if buyer’s buying decisions are different (they aren’t, we just know more). But all of this leads to… leads to what? |
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Close Faster By Wearing Your Prospects’ Shoes
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| There are many skills salespeople need to learn to be successful. In teaching these skills I have found that there are two words in the English language that most salespeople fail to clearly understand in meaning and application: “sympathy” and “empathy.” Not knowing the difference, and not knowing which will help you earn sales success, can cause significant delays in deals or may break them. |
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Advertising: The Nuts And Bolts Of Making It Work: Step Three: Make sure your advertising is specific, has substance and is credible
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| Being specific is essential in advertising. It answers questions and lends credibility to your advertising. Being specific is a surefire way to convert prospects into customers.
The more specific you are about what benefits your service and/or product has to offer to your customers the better response you will have from your advertising |
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Advertising: the nuts and bolts of making it work: Step Four: Be clear about your offer, and what you want your prospects to do, and give them a reason to take immediate action.
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| It would to help to understand what exactly an offer is. Your offer is the proposition you make to your marketplace, it is what you are willing to give in exchange for a response from your marketplace. Your offer is an entire package of elements, not just your product or service.
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Internet Millionaire’s “Network Marketing” Secrets: Strategies to Finding the Best Prospects
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| Let's be honest, everyone's looking for this grand secret to finding more leads and prospects for their network marketing business. The phrase that I constantly hear is "There's got to be an easier way to find more leads or make more sales than what I'm currently doing." Well, there is! These secrets, (secret only to those not familiar with attraction marketing), are what is going to determine your outcome in network marketing. Those that choose to go their own route and not follow these very simple strategies will notice exactly how much more effort has to be made in order to get the same results. |
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Release the Chains and Recover Your Life: Solve the Gremlin Problem!
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| Takeaway: Allow peace, rest and clarity in your life to attract the right people and resist the unneeded drama.
Quote: "The gremlins persist until you DECIDE to loose the chains" - Tony Calvano
It was the summer of 2007. It was quite a low point in my life. I had just finished a 40-day stint at an employer, and I was without a new opportunity for another 40 days. |
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The Invisible Close Sales Nugget: How Can I Present My Offer Without Sounding Like I'm Pitching Something?
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| You see, it all starts with your offer and clearly understanding the unique transformation that comes from investing with you. If you are clear about your offer and the outcome your clients will enjoy, then when you present it, it won't sound like pitching. It will sound like an extension of your contribution and content. But if you don't present your offer clearly, it's not going to sound authentic or enticing to your prospects no |
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The Job of Sales Must Expand
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| Sales is a needs assessment-problem discovery/solution placement model. We use relationships and industry knowledge and well-conceived product data to align with prospects to help influence them to choose us.
Now, with technology, we have even more capability to offer product data and find our what’s happening with the buyer. The internet, e-marketing, webinars, websites, are offering buyers whatever data they may need to choose. With our fabulous technology, we can track them, cookie them, send them stuff, entice them with blog posts. But at the end of the day, until or unless they make a purchase, we’ve done it all for naught. |
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Cold Calling Works - And It's Fun!
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| I’m here to tell you that cold calling can be one of the most effective ways to meet new prospects. And a whole lotta fun.
I know, I know. Most sellers eschew cold calling, preferring instead to network, get referrals, golf, meet face-to-face.
Did you ever ask yourself why? |
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SITES AND TESTIMONIALS: Turning Referrals Into Business On The Net
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| We all gather referrals/recommendations/testimonials in the hopes that they will sway the opinion of others and help us get business.
But how do we know what a prospect needs to hear in order to decide in our favor? Why do we assume that if we have a ‘good’ referral, it will meet a prospect’s criteria to choose us? Indeed, how do we know what will help our buyers buy? And, for the sake of this essay, how do we get the right material onto our sites? |
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Building the Futures of Others Today should be our mission
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| We build our business one individual at a time; each individual has just as much importance as the next. You have got to relate with your lead or prospect and discover what his or her needs and or wants are, then decide what products or services you have that can fulfill their needs or wants.
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How to turn your prospects into paying customers
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| One of the biggest battles in the search for business is getting your website found on the internet - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay per Click (PPC). You may be thinking that this is another article about SEO and if you were you will be forgiven for thinking this, but it's not at all...
SEO is a vital part of your online business, but it is not where it ends! Let me explain further...
People only buy when they:
1.Know your company;
2.Like what they see, and;
3.Trust you or your company.
So once you have spent your money attracting people to your website, you now need to direct your attention to converting those prospects into paying customers by working on the above list, so how do you do this? |
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Eight Steps for New Entrepreneurs to Obtain a Client
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| Converting a prospect to a client can become a daunting process, especially for a new entrepreneur. The prospect can bombard you with demands, try to get as much free information as possible, or just waste your time. This article provides some elementary steps I developed the hard way, from the school of lost business. |
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Get Rich in Network Marketing on the Internet by Learning to Leverage Your Time
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| Years ago when network marketing first became popular, it was not an easy business to get involved as finding prospects was quite an undertaking. Most of the work was done by sending out information via postal systems, holding meetings or calling people on the phone. |
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Understanding Your Prospects Readiness To Buy
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| By understanding your prospective client's readiness to buy you will be able to tailor your presentation to meet their specific needs. This article discusses the 4 different buying mindsets and how to position your products or services for each one. |
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Timing Your Stay-In-Touch Messages
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| Staying in ongoing contact with prospects and clients is often the most difficult aspect of marketing. This article answers the most common questions. |
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How to Use Twitter for Sales Prospecting
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| Today I’d like to chat a little about how you can use Twitter to identify hot prospects and begin a conversation with them that can lead to the beginnings of a strong relationship. Not only that, but you can accomplish this without leaving your desk, and without even picking up your phone! |
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Get Proactive About Referrals
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| Once you’ve set up a Referral Rewards Program, the next step is to get proactive and make asking for referrals a part of your sales and account management processes. This way you aren’t waiting for clients to think of you to offer them up. With a good process in place, you create a steady stream of referral prospects while letting your customers know how important referrals are to you. |
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Why Should Your Prospects Choose You? Show Them You Are Worthy!
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| It's interesting to look at the process people go through when starting a new website ...
Once they decide they need a site they begin to plan what content they'd like to have on the site.
The majority of the companies decide they need a page that talks about them so they add an "About Us" page to their site.
Secondly they would like to talk about their products or services so they add a "Products" or "Services" page to their site.
The most important part to the new website is giving it's visitors the ability to contact them to do business or ask questions which is where the infamous "Contact Us" page comes from. |
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Effective Ways in Building Trust
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| Whether you are a group leader, or a storeowner, or even an ordinary man walking down the street, one thing is for certain: people don't trust you. Why should they? They don't even know who you are. Life experience (not to mention ghastly news coverage) has warned them not to be naďve about life or about strangers that they meet.
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Evaluate Website Effectiveness
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| Websites have become the de-facto standard for communicating externally to customers, prospects, investors, potential employees, partners, and other key stakeholders.
Surprisingly, since the boom of web activity in the dot.com era, many organizations have failed to maintain an effective website. As the executive responsible for managing website programs, it is your responsibility to drive this online channel forward and create a competitive advantage in online presence. |
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Generate Leads with Webcasts
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| Providing on-demand webcasts to prospective customers is a rapidly growing demand generation strategy. Instead of having to call a salesperson at a potential vendor, your prospects can complete the research component of their buying process on their convenience. Evaluate your webcast requirements to determine if this tactic should be added to your marketing mix. |
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NDAs Reduce Business Development Risk
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| Business Development is an equally exciting and risky endeavor. Protect your organization by executing a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) prior to establishing relationships with unfamiliar vendors, potential partners, prospects, or investors. Use Demand Metric’s downloadable Non-Disclosure Agreement template as a starting point when drafting your various NDA documents. |
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Pull Prospects with Google AdWords
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| If you are looking to drive traffic to your website, Google AdWords is a cost-effective method which delivers measurable results to marketers. Visit the AdWords website to learn more, or read further to get a better understanding of the concept. |
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Ask Yourself
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| Ask yourself what prospects like yours might want. |
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Is Safelist Marketing Still A Viable Way To Attract And Convert Prospects?
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| Safelist marketing is still an effective option. However, it is important to understand that your tactics may need to change a little to become effective. If you use these 3 safelist marketing tips with consistency you should be able to increase your conversions. |
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Tactics For Keeping Score On Your Business
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| How To Analyze and Report Sales and Profit Generating Activity.
Whether you are a solopreneur, manage a team or are responsible for the whole organization. Tracking wins and loses is not good enough in sales or any performance area of the business for that matter. A methodical, yet meaningful tracking of results can reveal important areas of needed improvement as well as successes that need to be replicated. |
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Are You Working in the Red Zone, or Just Working?
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| What is worth the effort in your business? Where does your productivity and focus pay off the most? Of course, the activities that produce the greatest results are not the easiest. The biggest successes often come when we are in the difficult, magnified, and critical “red zone.” |
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Lesson #2: Be Positive
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| “I believe in taking a positive attitude toward the world, toward people, toward my work,” said Henson. |
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Lesson #1: Failure Is Your Friend On the Road To Success
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| Watson thought about his success in plain terms. When he was once asked what the secret to all he had achieved in his life was, Watson replied, “It’s quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure. You’re thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn’t at all.” |
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Lesson #4: Never Underestimate the Power of Research
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| Ogilvy came from a background in research; in his early years he had worked for the world-renowned George Gallup Audience Research Institute, which he later called “the luckiest break of my life.” It was at Gallup that Ogilvy learned about research and its importance in advertising. In fact, research became so central to Ogilvy’s philosophy of creating advertising that when he opened his own agency in 1952, Ogilvy billed himself as Research Director. |
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Lesson #3: The Accidental Entrepreneur is No Accidental Success
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| “There is such a thing as a natural-born entrepreneur, for whom the entrepreneurial urge drives everything, and who can make a business out of almost anything,” says Moore. “But the accidental entrepreneur like me has to fall into the opportunity or be pushed into it. Then the entrepreneurial spirit eventually catches on.” Moore and Noyce are evidence of the fact that entrepreneurs do not necessarily have to be born as such. Through a process of discovering their passion and being unhappy with their prospects at other companies, Moore and Noyce decided to start up their own business. It was their willingness to admit their shortcomings and seek out the help of others that the two accidental entrepreneurs in fact became two of the most successful entrepreneurs in modern time. |
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Lesson #1: Playing it Safe is Not Playing at All
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| When Barnum was just 19 years old, he started the weekly newspaper, “The Herald of Freedom.” Based in Danbury, Connecticut, the paper was meant to be controversial from the onset. Barnum wanted to use the four-page “Herald” as a platform from which to argue against religious oppression and the militant Calvinism in which he was brought up. On every issue was even printed Thomas Jefferson’s famous saying, “For I have sworn upon the Altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.” |
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The Process of Marketing
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| Marketing is not an event, but a process. How long does the process last? |
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Please go away (angry)
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| If you've got more than one person in your organization, you probably have a policy or two. And those policies have certainly made someone angry. Now what? |
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Guerrillas in the Real World
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| Marketing is a waste of money and time if you’re not attuned to the real world. Reality is not necessarily what you want it to be or what it used to be. Instead, reality is what really is. To many marketers, that’s a major problem, but to guerrilla, it’s an inviting chance to stand apart from the competition. |
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Eleven Sales Success Secrets
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| Use these ideas to increase your sales productivity: |
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When To Halt A Marketing Attack
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| The day you close the doors to your business is the only smart time to halt a guerrilla marketing attack. No other day is a good day for quitting. |
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Marketing Your Marketing
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| Don’t limit your marketing merely to the media you’re using. Market it all over the place. Anything worth promoting is worth cross-promoting. |
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How Long Till Marketing Works?
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| Whatever you do, don’t hold your breath while waiting for marketing to take affect. Instead, hold your horses because it’s not gonna happen instantly. |
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Insights for a New Millenium
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| An old adage reminds us that if you have foresight, you are blessed, and if you have insight, you are twice blessed. Here are two insights to make you quadruple blessed. |
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Guerrilla Marketing as Sex
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| The whole idea of guerrilla marketing is to transform cold prospects into
consenting partners. As with superb sex, marketers shouldn't be in a
hurry, shouldn't direct their energies to disinterested people and must
realize that the consummation of a loving relationship won't take place
without proper wooing, without knowing exactly what turns on the prospect. |
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What is Your Company?
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| You know exactly what your company is, what it stands for, what it offers to its target audience and what it hopes to accomplish. But is that really your company? |
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The New Power Of Advertising
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| A website is an island. Advertising is a bridge to that island. Large and small businesses online are discovering that truth in a hurry – or else. Advertising is not what it used to be. The internet has changed its purpose and its strength. Rather than making advertising in the traditional media weaker, the net has made it stronger. That’s why all guerrillas must be aware of the new power of advertising. |
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Five New Rules for Marketing
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| Marketing is part art, part science and part business. Because it's such a subjective thing, there are few hard and fast rules. But here are five new ones to guide you in your quest to boost your profits with a minimum investment and avoid nasty surprises along the way. |
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Thinking Freely
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| This is the time to think freely. This is the time to think as hard as you can of what you can give away to your prospects for free. If you can possibly give away your product or service for a limited time, you have a good chance to habituate your prospects to your offering and a great chance to prove your service superiority. The idea behind this strategy is: give your prospects an ownership experience for free. |
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Just like a small business should
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| John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing has a great post about Espresso Dating, the new partnership between Starbucks and Yahoo! Personals. |
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Marketings Greatest Enemy
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| You work like crazy trying to attract attention and business, operating from a marketing calendar, committing to your strategy and doing everything right, resulting in an influx of customers -- but you lose them. They never come back. |
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360 Degree Marketing
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| Here's the problem: Your prospects and customers have short attention spans and millions of businesses attempting to attract their attention. |
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The Designated Guerrilla
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| Reality in running a small business means knowing exactly what you've got to do but not having enough time to do it. If you understand how guerrilla marketing can propel you into hyperprofitability but can't take the steps to activate and maintain the process, your understanding is wasted. |
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The Two Worlds of Marketing
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| Once you have even the spark of a notion to market online, let that
spark ignite thoughts of how you'll promote your site. Have the insight
to know this means thinking imaginatively about two worlds. |
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Guerrilla Effectiveness
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| There is a world of difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and it’s in that world that guerrillas flourish. They are well aware of the power and omnipresence of the 80/20 rule and have probably read Richard Koch’s book, "The 80/20 Principle" because even its subtitle -- "The Secret of Achieving More with Less" -- is guerrilla through and through. It dramatically emphasizes the effectiveness that can be gained by simplicity. |
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Integrated Marketing
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| Whatever does guerrilla marketing have in common with a boomerang? If you throw a stick, it flies about 30 feet. Frank Donnellan once threw a boomerang 377 feet, longer than football field. A boomerang uses gravity and air resistance to aid its flight. Guerrilla marketing uses other weapons to aid its flight. Single-weapon marketing has nothing to aid its flight. |
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The Magic and Tragic Words of Marketing
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| Magic words propel great ideas towards profitability. Tragic words doom great ideas to failure. Guerrillas know the difference. |
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The New Secrets of Guerrilla Marketing
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| The most important things you need to know about marketing are in this column. In the few minutes it takes you to read this, you'll learn more basic truths about marketing than you'd pick up with a score of MBA degrees under one arm and all the marketing books ever written, including mine, under the other.
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Guerrilla Direct Response
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| Direct response marketing is a lot different from indirect response marketing, although guerrillas like it best when the two are teamed up. The first is geared to obtain orders right here and right now. The second is geared to obtain orders eventually. Although a fair amount of standard, indirect marketing often is necessary to set the stage, to make prospects ready to buy, and to separate your company from strangers, it’s when you initiate direct marketing that you first taste blood. |
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Guerrilla Reality
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| Marketing is a waste of money and time if you're not attuned to reality. Reality is not necessarily what you want it to be or what it used to be. Instead, reality is what really is. To many marketers, that's a major problem, but to guerrilla marketers, it's an inviting opportunity to stand apart from the competition. |
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Sales Call Objective
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| It is important for you to know what you want to happen as a result of meeting with your prospect because everything you say will lead toward that goal and you control the conversation and steer it in the right direction. You need to decide what your sales call objective is before you call the prospect. Prospects are busy, and you will be more successful if you know your objective. Do everything you can to make it easier for the prospect to say yes. |
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Sell Em What They Want
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| I had an interesting conversation with a colleague the other day. We were discussing the fact that, try as we might, our prospects don't always know that they need what we have to offer. Often, they think they know what they want, but professional (not infallible) experience tells us we might know better. |
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Guerrilla Caring
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| All business owners care about their customers, but guerrilla marketers prove they care. Here are twenty ways that they prove it. |
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Guerrilla Problem-Solving
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| Guerrillas know that it's easier to sell the solution to a problem than to sell a positive benefit. That's why they position themselves as problem-solvers. |
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Frequency in Marketing
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| Take a reality check to determine how clearly you understand what your prospects are thinking each time they look at your advertisement. |
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But What Do I Write On My Business Blog?
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| Man, do I get tired of the question posed in the title of this post. |
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The Power of Asking: 7 Ways to Boost Your Business
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| The gift called “asking” has been around for a long, long time. One of life’s fundamental truths states, “Ask and you shall receive.” Kids are masters at using this gift, but we adults seem to have lost our ability to ask. We come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons to avoid any possibility of rejection. |
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Most of the Time Talent's Not Enough
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| You're a talented writer, designer, speaker, consultant, coach, salesperson, but doors aren't flying open for you. Why not? Talent, I'm afraid, is assumed - a lot of people have talent. It's the price to get into the game. Talent, married with creativity, however, is how you get out of the cheap seats. (In fact, creativity will allow you to get places with lesser talent than others - oops, potential self indictment) |
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The TRUST Selling Process
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| The better prepared you are, the greater the chance for success. Preparation compensates for a lack of talent! The R is for “Relate,” which is building trust and rapport with the prospect. The focus in this step is on the prospect, not on you. This step is a continuous process. You should relate to the prospect through the entire process. You are continually establishing, building and maintaining trust and rapport. |
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100 Ways to Succeed #39
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| Blog As If Your Life Depended On It! |
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Build Your Boats Before You Need Them
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| A lot of folks thinking about starting a business spend all their time doing the typical start-up stuff like incorporating, finding office space, and designing business cards. All good and needed steps mind you, but don’t neglect the most important step. |
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Two Questions That Matter Most
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| When you consider writing marketing copy, throw out all your notions about features and benefits, riveting, detailed descriptions and techno jargon and focus on answering the only two questions that really matter - and do it before you pass go. |
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Empathy
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| A flurry of unsolicited questions came in on Friday, including two "please review my blog" letters, and a "please review my book" package. (For the record, I'm totally useless at reviewing your blog, sorry.) |
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Guerrilla Timing
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| If your marketing is right, but your timing is wrong, watch out. Even the best-laid plans go awry when the timing is off. Here's how to prevent that. |
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Timeless Internet Advice
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| Nobody on earth knows that you're online until you tell them. And even when you tell them, they're probably not paying attention. |
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Guerrilla Proposals
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| It's at Proposal Time That The Rubber Meets the Road. To Get The Best Ride Possible, You've Got to Present a Guerrilla Proposal. Here's How. |
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Every Media Mention Counts
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| Sometimes to get the PR ball rolling you’ve just got to get a little press. It doesn’t matter if that ends up being a mention in the neighborhood business association’s newsletter. Work every angle when you are just getting started and eventually you will start build up some steam. |
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Guerrilla New Business
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| The obtaining of precious new business is a whole lot easier than you may have imagined -- but only if you have the mindset of the guerrilla |
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Guerrilla Competitive Advantages
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| Everybody offers benefits in their marketing, but guerrillas stress those benefits that only they offer. That's where to hang your marketing hat. |
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Memorize These 12 Words Then Live By Them
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| I'm giving you a memory crutch so that you'll never forget these words. All 12 words end in the letters "ENT." Run your business by the guerrilla concepts they represent and you'll be in marketing heaven. |
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What Are You Afraid Of?
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| Fear is the most basic of human elements and plays a major role in business success and failure. |
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Guerrilla Persuasion
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| Marketing is persuasion at its core. You must persuade individuals or groups to part with one of their most prized possessions: -- their money.
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Could you pull a Radiohead?
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| Radiohead, a wildly popular UK band, shocked the music world by first dumping their record label and then announcing that they planned to make their latest album, In Rainbows, available digitally with a “pay what you think it’s worth” pricing model. |
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Begin Your Publicity Campaign
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| Begin your publicity campaign with a master plan. Long before you even put your site online, focus upon the key messages you want your prospects to know about your company, they online and offline publications where you want those messages to appear, and specific ideas for articles. |
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Staying top of mind
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| It’s a pretty accepted fact that finding ways to do more business or get more referrals from your existing customers is a smart way to build a business. But as the din of noisy demands captures your attention it’s easy to forget all about those existing customers until they pick-up the phone and reorder.
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Stumped for content?
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| Content is the commerce of social media. But, relevant content, the stuff your customers and prospects actually want to know is the gold. Constantly cranking out this gold can sometimes present creative challenges. |
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The spirit of the game
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| There are two ways to get ahead. You can work the system or you can beat the system. |
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Problems
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| Got A Problem? Find A Problem! Many years ago Dr. Karl Meninger of the world-famed Meninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, was asked the question: "What would you do if you feared that a nervous breakdown was coming on?" Without hesitation Dr. Meninger said, "I would find somebody with a bigger problem and get involved with helping him solve his problem; in the process I would forget about my own." |
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Patience in Marketing
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| Take a reality check to determine how clearly you understand what your
prospects are thinking each time they look at your advertisement. |
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GUERRILLA SOFT STEPS
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| It's a hard step for a prospect to decide to buy from you. Guerrillas
make that hard step a whole lot easier by offering prospects several
soft steps. |
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What I Don’t Know
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| What we don’t know about our markets, our customers, our products, our business is where our lack of growth and outright failure resides. Of course, the rub is this - on our own, we don’t know what we don’t know and are powerless to do anything about it. |
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Do You Suffer from Occasional Contentapation?
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| You’ve got a blog, you’re getting into the education based, content rich, web presence thing, but sometimes you just can’t think of anything to say. Don’t worry, you’re not alone and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Millions of marketers have begun to complain about the symptoms commonly diagnosed as Contentapation. |
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Adding Social Features to Your Web Site
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| The web has become a terribly social place and that raises the expectation of most web site visitors. The ability to add content, comment, rate, review, interact and share information found when surfing the web has become standard fare. |
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Like a dream come true
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| That's the way Derek Sivers (founder of CDBaby) described his mission statement in building the company. "What could I build that would be a like a dream come true for independent musicians?" |
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Advertising No Longer Has to Make the Sale
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| Not very long ago, advertising's main goal was to make the sale, though there are many other goals. But that has changed dramatically with the growth of dotcom companies all over the internet. Today, the goal of much advertising is not to make the sale but to direct people to websites. |
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Prospect List
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| Make a list of prospects who have not yet been converted to customers. Then, select the ten who will most likely be most profitable for your business. |
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The Ultimate Measure of Marketing Success
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| While many metrics help marketers determine the success of things like messaging, lead campaigns, and brand awareness there is one all-important metric that I believe, if captured, is the key to unraveling every marketing challenge that you face. |
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Collaborate or Die! Me, Seth Godin and John Jantsch
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| Here are two great tips on collaboration – a major theme in WGYB – from marketing whizzes Seth Godin and John Jantsch. Seth and John will be joining me in the first of several FREE teleseminars – go here to sign up for the call, June 8 at 12ET. To see the list of other great authors involved in the WGYB calls, visit my blog. |
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Trade Show Tidbits
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| Instead of a brochure, hand out a one-page fact sheet. Do a pre-show promotion because 33% of people attending a show do so because of a promotion. |
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5 Tips for Getting More Leads from Speaking
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| A lot of folks dream of being a sought after, highly paid speaker (some people wet themselves at the thought of it as well.) But, in this education based marketing environment we find ourselves in today, speaking for leads may be the best approach ever. |
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Follow-up Is the Momentum Building Power Tool
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| Woody Allen was attributed with the quote - "eighty percent of success is showing up" but I would add that in marketing it's all about following up. |
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Listening Key To Closing Sales
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| If you want to close more sales calls, you need to be able to clearly know and understand why your prospects aren't buying from you. Consistent sales behaviors, asking great questions, tracking and measuring are the tools you need to put into place so you can "hear" what your prospects are saying. |
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Don't Judge a Book, or an Online Franchise Inquiry by its Cover
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| Remember the old saying "Don't judge a book by its cover?" This is a good rule of thumb for sales inquiries generated for franchisors by online portals. When it comes to reaching out to prospects who have expressed interest in buying their franchise, however, franchisors too frequently dismiss the inquiries they get from portals and third party web sites as 'junk' or subpar. According to Mario Altiery, President and CEO of the Upside Group, and other franchise sales consulting and training professionals, it's not the quality of the leads, but how franchisors are handling those inquiries and communicating with prospects that perpetuates what has become a very inefficient sales process. |
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How do I deal with client objections?
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| Many sales people will tell you one of the biggest worries in sales, besides prospecting, is dealing with customer objections. Its true many people do not like dealing with objections or conflict, however, it is also true that many people unintentionally create objections and conflict by not understanding a customer’s real needs or priorities and failing to find common ground.
In my opinion ‘overcoming objections’ is often blown out of proportion in terms of the issue it claims to be. Too much time and attention is spent on objections in sales meetings and sales training rather than focusing on the skills and resources needed to help sales people eliminate objections from the sales process in the first place. |
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What Questions Do New Customers Ask of Entrepreneurs?
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| Amongst many things, entrepreneurs spot a hole in the market, create something ‘new’ (or different) and move fast. They need to be cash conscious, astute risk takers, careful business planners, passionate and energised. They influence financiers, associates and (most vital of all) ‘new’ customers. Good entrepreneurs sell and sell well. (And in the current economy, many who were once in the order-taking-by-word-of-mouth business need to learn to sell too.)
They start by raising customers’ curiosity. And once they have raised curiosity, how can entrepreneurs go about selling, a ‘new’ product or service to a ‘new’ customer, well?
Answer: understand the sequence and the nature of the questions all customers ask.
What questions?
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Small Business: Creating Life Long Customers
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| When sales and marketing people talk about the sales funnel, they are really talking about the number of prospects they have that MAY convert to sales. This is a pretty common term in these circles and there is a fairly well defined process of qualification that moves suspects to prospects to qualified buyers to lifelong customers. It's important for all business owners to understand this process - even if they aren't involved in the sales process directly - as they will be able to better support their sales professionals in acquiring new business. |
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We want more than a script
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| Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of sales people around the world use sales scripts. Used properly, sales scripts act as scaffolding or bridgework to earn us the right to have a meaningful discussion with our prospecting customers, members, donors or subscribers. The sales script is a well constructed set of guidelines that support us when we prospect.
Good sales scripts:
* are purposeful – have a clear reason why you are calling someone;
* use language the customer understands;
* are designed for the benefit of the listener with it always being “the prospects choice” to accept or reject what they hear;
* are brief and allow for questions and conversations;
* aim to achieve a result – an appointment, donation, purchase, feedback, etc; |
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A World of Possibility
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| When I started my sales career over 25 years ago, I worked for a small company selling telephone answering equipment. Hard to believe it but in those days I had to explain to prospects what the equipment was for and why they might want to use it.
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Online Home Based Business Opportunity - Tips to Financial Freedom
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| The online home based business opportunity allows you to be your own boss and set your own hours. It is also is your responsibility to make it successful and you will need to learn the various ingredients that it takes to make it on the Internet and off the net. On the Internet, this means promotional marketing. This today, is completely centered on search engine optimization, and can be easily learned through visiting the forums and taking online training courses. Off the Internet, it means having the tools to present to various prospects such as business cards, brochures or flyers, and the knowledge of your business to thoroughly discuss it with others. |
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Are You Fighting for the Right Customers?
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| At first glance, you would think they would be the clients or prospects that have the most profit potential. However, life is not this simple. |
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10 Mistakes Job Searchers Make
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| You've started a job search. You are excited about the prospects of finding the perfect job. Of course you have a concern about how long the job search will take but you want to make sure your job search is effective. Here are some mistakes you'll want to avoid. |
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Five Ways to Stay in touch with Clients and Prospects without Breaking the Bank
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| Most entrepreneurs do marketing whenever they have a minute to fit it in-or they don’t do it all. But if you’re not staying in front of clients and prospects regularly they’re sure to forget all about you and the value you offer. That means you’re losing business… |
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The Power of Repetition and Focus
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| Two elements are key when it comes to occupying a piece of your prospects mind. Repetition and Focus. Learn why they are essential if you are to earn your unfair share of the market. |
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Sales Tip - Top Salespeople Know to Underscore and Not Space Out Serving Their Prospects!
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| One of the biggest problems salespeople have is not understanding who the selling ultimately helps: win, win, win sound familiar? There are long and short ways to underscore your prospect and with that, increase your sales. |
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If Your Business had a Voice, Who would it Sound Like?
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| Every business has a voice that comes through in your marketing. That voice has the power to grab your prospect’s attention and hold it, or make them turn away in boredom or frustration. So if you’ve never given the voice of your business a second thought it’s time to reconsider. |
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You have a buying process problem, not a selling problem
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| You know your solution. You understand your buyer's need. You know how to sell. So why aren't you selling more? Why aren't prospects closing more? |
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Gaining Access to Power in a Buyer's Organization
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| Executive Summary:
Sell to people with buying authority. Sales reps must understand the level of buying authority their contacts have within buying organizations. Reps must gain access to true power, and sell to buyers that have the ability to authorize transactions and close deals. |
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Create a Prospecting Tracking Process
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| Executive Summary:
Adhering to processes creates consistent results. Sales leaders who regularly track the
prospecting efforts of their sales reps see better, more consistent results. Making prospecting
a company objective, and rewarding the efforts of sales reps who prospect effectively on a
consistent basis, will embed prospecting into the culture of the sales organization. |
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You will have more prospects in your online business with an abundance mentality.
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| Have you ever chased after that beloved person and the only thing you managed to do is to chase her away? The harder you tried to be with her, as quicker she ran? Calling her four times a day didn't help either. Were you so afraid to lose her because she is the one and only one for you?
The emotions that drive you to act this way are the same ones that work with your online business. |
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Become An Effective Communicator And Build Your Home Business
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| There are few born effective communicators and effective communication skills are fundamental to the success of your business. If you are lacking confidence, have problems with the technical aspects of communication get some help. There are many organisations that offer excellent courses and in-depth training on all aspects of communication for building your home business. Remember effective communication builds trust and lifelong relationships with your prospects and clients who will be loyal to you and who will want to join you in any of your home business opportunities. |
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Real Estate Marketing Strategies: Prospecting Made Easy
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| Do you dread picking up the phone to prospect for clients? Figuring out what’s stopping you could be your first step in improving your business! |
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5 Lessons from a Master Storyteller
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| We can all learn to bring our message to life with fabulous stories. We can all learn to be better storytellers - focusing on our customers and prospects, and not our own chest thumping selves.
That's where true marketing begins!
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Marketing Tips: Look at Your Website Like You Are Visiting a Foreign Country
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| Your website prospects are like tourists in a foreign country. They don’t know you. They don’t trust you. They have many other vendors to choose from. They want to buy something like yours from someone like you. It could be you if you do the right things. It won’t be you if you don’t.
Here are five keys to improving your website so you connect with your prospects. |
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Referrals: Get More Client by Asking "Disqualifying Questions"
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| What would happen if you ran an ad on Google and everyone clicked on it?
Would you be thrilled that so many people wanted to know about your service?
Or would be shocked at the size of the bill and your inability to handle so many requests for information so quickly?
Maybe both.
That’s why you need to ask “disqualifying questions” when you do any form of marketing. If you don’t, you’ll find that you have a lot of unqualified prospects and more people than you can handle. And you won’t be able to give the proper attention you need to the prospects who are truly interested in your service and qualified to buy. |
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Shortcuts to Copywriting Success! How to Find Inspiration in the Work of Others
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| Tips for ethically finding creative ideas in other people’s work. |
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Press Release Basics for Internet Publicity Or Mainstream Media Submission
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| Press releases are relatively simple to write. However, there is a specific formula that you must use or you could damage your credibility. |
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How to Generate More Sales with Headlines
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| Here are 4 easy ways to craft compelling headlines for more customers and more sales. |
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Do Your Marketing Materials Include an
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| Ask your customers to take action and watch your sales increase. |
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How Your Salespeople Can Eliminate the Competition
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| If your company is like most, you have lots of competition and some of them will do anything to get the business. How would you like to eliminate your competition? I don't mean putting them out of business (some of you wouldn't mind that at all) but I do mean getting them out of the way...
There are three ways to eliminate increasing competition for a declining number of opportunities: |
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Can Your Salespeople Sell More Effectively by Asking More Questions?
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| Selling by asking questions is hard. A list of questions isn't the answer. Left to their own devices, your salespeople won't be able to create the kind of questions that are needed. You might not be able to either. |
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When Agreement is Really Disagreement - Happy Ears for Salespeople
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| Happy Ears or Effective Salespeople? It all comes down to training, coaching, observation skills, commitment and practice. When put that way, there is as much burdon on you as there is on your salespeople. Are you up for this challenge? |
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Election Day - Like Decision Making Day for Salespeople
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| The presentation, and still later, the proposal, are simply a formality that leads to getting the business when the selling that was conducted earlier was effective. |
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Effective or Easiest - Which Path Will Your Salespeople Choose?
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| There are always one or two crucial turning points in every sales cycle where your salespeople must choose between asking the tough question that's called for, or saying what's comfortable for them. 74% of the sales population will always go for comfort because it's the path of least resistance. |
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Do Salespeople Have to Give up Control to Their Prospects?
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| I just read Why Won't Anyone Return My !*#@$% Call by Don Fornes over at Software Advice. Don's read of the current selling environment, specifically cold-calling, entry point into the sales process, and the table stakes just to play are dead-on. Most of his conclusions are good as well.
I disagree with his article when he implies that we should be resigned to the fact that there isn't much to be done except building trust until the prospect is ready to engage.
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The Single Biggest Mistake That Salespeople Make
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| Ask 10 people and you'll get 10 different answers about the biggest mistake that salespeople make. Ask the question a bit differently and I will give you a different answer too. But ask the question in the title - "What is the single biggest mistake that salespeople make?", with the key word being mistake - something they do incorrectly rather than due to a weakness - and I can provide data to back it up. There are actually 3 mistakes that are nearly always made but 2 of them happen as a result of the single biggest mistake. |
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The Relationship Between the Relationship and the Sales Outcome Part 2
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| Have you ever worked with salespeople that were so bad you thought, "She couldn't close a door!"? And have you ever worked with salespeople that were so good that you thought, "She could sell white to rice!"? |
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The Whiners - Salespeople Who Get Your Attention
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| Your top performers (real sales professionals) aren't the ones taking their time (and yours) to whine. Oh no. This stuff is the exclusive domain of the under achievers and they whine to justify their lack of success. Whining might distract you from their dismal performance and further distract them from performing the work they're supposed to be doing. |
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Salespeople Become More Effective Part 2
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| You must talk about Sales Process and, assuming it's been formally developed, structured, optimized and introduced, include it in every daily coaching and development call so that the backdrop for your conversations is "Where in the process are you?" In Baseline Selling, that would sound like "Which Base are you on?" |
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How to fill your pipeline pre- and post-sale? Thought leadership is the answer
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| Filling the sales pipeline is one of the most talked about aspects of marketing and sales. In this article I challenge conventional thinking about how to fill the pipeline and advocate that in fact thought leaderhip is one of the most effective ways to do so. |
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How Small Business Can Also Offer Perfect Customer Service
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| Internet has made business operations easy and at the same time extremely difficult too. While you have better access to target markets, your customers have similar access to your prospects. Just one dissatisfied customer can negatively influence hundreds of other people online. Poor customer service can mar your company’s growth and can even bring your business down permanently. So, if your customers are not happy with your service (and they might not tell you directly about it) – then you have a thing or two to worry about. |
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Saying No to Others is Saying YES to Yourself
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| There are only two words that will always lead you to success. Those words are yes and no. Undoubtedly, you’ve mastered saying yes. So start practicing saying no. Your goals depend on it! |
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Improve How Your Sales Force Sells by Phone
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| If your salespeople are unable to interest their prospects there is zero chance of reaching the goal for the call which, depending on the salesperson's role, could be anything from a qualified lead to a scheduled appointment to a transactional sale. |
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Enhancing Leadership Skills
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| Some people look over the screen at their boss and think there but the grace
go I. After all being the boss, the leader has to be about the easiest job
in the world. What's to do? Sit around ...give orders...check the work...take
the credit for succcesses, blame others for failures.
Problem is it just doesn't work that way and even the best leader needs to brush
up on, improve, hone his/her skills. Here are some ideas and thoughts that may
help you become an even better leader than you already are. |
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Recruiting Strong Salespeople - The Sales Candidate Pipeline
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| Recruiting Salespeople - again?
Yes. I cannot write enough about this!
But, as usual, I'll address recruiting from a slightly different perspective this time - the candidate pipeline. Not to be confused with the candidate pool which is simply a single component of the pipeline.
Your sales pipeline should have four stages:
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Case History - Sneak Preview of a Candidate
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| It never ceases to amaze me when clients receive nasty-grams from sales candidates who are - let's call it put-off - by the client's request that they first take our on-line assessment. The candidates receive a very nice email thanking them for sending their resume, explaining the client's recruiting process and asking them to take the assessment. You just wouldn't believe some of the notes I've seen. Name calling, cussing, threats, sarcasm, and more. Here's a typical sample: |
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Product Training is Not Enough!
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| Many small business owners invest time and energy to ensure that their sales people are well versed in fully understanding the products the sell. Some even take the time to train their teams on how to differentiate their offerings to gain a competitive advantage. This is all good. |
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Trade Show Selling
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| Trade shows provide a unique but different type of opportunity to sell your products and services. Here are some tips to help you maximize your time and effectivness. |
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Fishing and Selling
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| What do fishing and selling have in common? Anyone.... |
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Game 7 - There is No Tomorrow with This Sales Opportunity
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| Don't turn opportunities where there IS a tomorrow into a desperate, "How much of a price concession do we have to make?", last ditch effort to close it today scenario, but do turn a customer/prospect-initiated deadline into a Game 7 scenario where you do whatever it takes to earn that business! |
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Social Media Marketing…The Challenge of Herding Cats
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| Social media marketing, communications. Gawd it sounds like soooo much fun...so interesting...so challenging...so mano y mano! Too bad everyone thinks of it as just another marketing/advertising tool to push ideas, products at folks. That isn't what social media communications is all about. It's about the customer. So start with the one you've got. Work with him/her. Make them happy...very happy. Help them be your advocates, your promoters. They'll tell a few folks how good your company, products, services are and in "almost" no time word will spread round the globe. Get out there. Get your hands dirty. You can't herd cats. You can't herd consumers. Get in the saddle with the attitude you can and they'll turn on you. Show they why your product/service is so good. Show them how to install, troubleshoot, use it. Then .. |
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Compelling Reasons for Your Salespeopole to Go Mobile
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| Good Sales Managers know how important it is for their salespeople to uncover needs.
But it goes way beyond needs.
As I detail in Baseline Selling - How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball, it requires that your salespeople learn about their prospects' compelling reasons to buy. Not just their needs. The issues, problems and frustrations - and even the consequences - that would cause them to spend money and spend it with your company, instead of your competitor.
But it goes well beyond compelling reasons.
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10 Reasons Why Sales Commitment Has Become More Important
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| A comparison of selling today with selling over the past 20 years shows that selling is significantly more challenging today than ever before. Let's take a look at 10 of the factors that explain this shift in difficulty: |
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5 Frustrations that Derail the Sales Force
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| I write a lot about the things that frustrate Presidents, CEO's, Sales VP's and Salespeople. Yesterday, somebody asked what frustrates me so I attempted to tackle that question here.
I'm very steady and what you see on Monday, you'll probably get on Tuesday and Wednesday too. That said, there are things that will make me eat faster or more often, and here you can read my top 5:
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Game 7 - There is No Tomorrow with These Sales Opportunities
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| don't turn opportunities where there IS a tomorrow into a desperate, "How much of a price concession do we have to make?", last ditch effort to close it today scenario, but do turn a customer/prospect-initiated deadline into a Game 7 scenario where you do whatever it takes to earn that business! |
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The Magic of Jiffy Lube, Sales Adaptability and Plagiarism
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| Perhaps you've noticed that while driving past a Jiffy Lube during (slow times for them) your commute there may be a mechanic out front, holding a sign, offering a discount, hoping you'll pull in. I don't know about you, but I am not particularly moved by a guy in a jump suit waving for me to stop. But it made me wonder, does this work? |
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Great Way To Recruit People To Your Network Marketing Company Literally Overnight
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| One of the great ways how to recruit people to your network marketing company is to invite them to some live event. It can be a business overview call, marketing training, conference call or live webinar. |
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The Role of Preparation in Developing Top Salespeople
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| The Internet has made it easier than ever for prospects to find your company, a benefit of Sales 2.0. The upside is that your leads are coming from unexpected places and you are getting audiences with prospects you may not have found ten years ago. The downside is that this has changed the sales process, accelerated the sales cycle and in some cases, made it more difficult than ever for companies to close these new found opportunities. |
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Sales 2.0 - Answer to Our Prayers or Costly Distraction?
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| Every day I read, hear and get asked about the various modern methods for salespeople to meet, engage and get in front of prospects. Every day, the emphasis moves a little further toward the Sales 2.0 approach to getting found - LinkedIn, Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, E-blasts, and Youtube. |
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Xobni as Sales Assistant, Pivots Help Close Sales
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| How to use Pivots to change the direction of a sales call or business strategy. |
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Who’s Recovering the Quickest – Is it You?
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| We hear that the recession is on the wane and that there may be growth this year, albeit with high unemployment plaguing us for a while. Notwithstanding that you as the self-employed entrepreneur may not yet be feeling a recovery, it is happening. |
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5 Reasons To Not Join Multiple Network Marketing Companies At The Same Time.
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| The temptation to join more than one network marketing company is easy to succumb to. However, you will find it nearly impossible to operate multiple business opportunities simultaneously. Only work one networking business at a time and give it all you have. |
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3 Sales Approaches of Elite Salespeople
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| Great salespeople must be able to easily use all three approaches on their sales calls. Salespeople that struggle tend to have just one approach and it won't work all the time. |
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If Your Salespeople Can't Prospect They Will be Marginalized
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| That's according to Ken Edmundson, my guest on yesterday's edition of Meet the Sales Experts.
He said that business as we see it today is the new normal and that for most companies, taking business away from the competition is the only avenue for rebuilding sales and growth. |
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SALES PRESENTATION ... THE BOTTOM LINE IS SELLING
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| Talk about two sides of the coin just think of the sales call. If you're in sales then it is all about the person in front of the other person/group. If you're in marketing it is all about the polished, super slick presentation. If you're the CEO and CFO it's all about the order. Surprise!!!! It takes them all. And a presentation should be tailored by the sales people so that it fits their style and the audience. And it should go where few marketing people have gone before...it should ask for the order. The best sales call is a gentle balance of the sales people and their sales tools. We just want to make it better for them. |
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Great Sales Opportunities That Don't Close
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| If getting opportunities into the pipeline is the most universal sales challenge, then getting opportunities closed comes in a close second. I'm talking about prospects who aren't ready to say, "yes" but are still "very interested". These calls pose problems for salespeople for several reasons: |
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Top 10 Rules for Getting Your Salespeople to Follow Your Sales Process
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| Sales Management's number one priority is to assure that their salespeople don't fall into old habits, take shortcuts, get lazy, or avoid steps in the sales process where they aren't as skilled or comfortable. Once your customized, optimized, integrated sales process is in place and introduced, my top 10 rules for all things sales process, strategy and tactics are: |
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What Does it Mean When You Can't Reach Your Sales Team?
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| When you can't reach anyone on your sales team is that a good thing or a bad thing?
When they are all on sales calls, working the phones, or with customers/clients is that a good thing or a bad thing? |
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How Does the Salesperson Affect Price Shoppers and Negotiators?
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| When salespeople have a discussion about money, price shoppers usually make it very clear what their intentions are. On the other hand, negotiators don't usually advertise their intentions in advance. Instead, they'll negotiate after they have received a proposal. |
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Global Business Requires Healthy Dose of Local Alliances, Thinking
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| It's wonderful to see how indignant innocent little Google can become when someone
out-hacks, out-snoops them. For crying out loud don't the folks who did that
understand that providing information is the way Google makes its money???
If that weren't bad enough, Eric can not only not sit in on Steve's board meetings
where some hot new ideas must have been discussed but now Steve doesn't even
like Eric's company motto -- man is nothing sacred?
On the Internet the answer is no! Your every keyclick is followed by someone
-- yes even ours !!! |
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IT’S TIME WE LEARNED A VALUABLE LESSON FROM ADVERTISING
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| Here's a valuable lesson direct marketers can learn from the field of advertising. |
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MLM / Network Marketing Prospecting: Don’t Be Afraid To Approach Any Goliath
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| We all have the tendency to pre-judge potential prospects as not being interested in joining our network marketing business. This is wrong as those that we perceive to be making a lot of money may not be. Or those that seem to have it all together may not. |
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Network Marketing Tips: Why you have trouble building your downline.
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| After the initial fire of emotional excitement and possibility dies down (usually by day 90 in a new network marketing opportunity), and the boat loads of cash aren't rolling in, a fundamental question arrives: Why doesn't anyone see what I see and how do I find people who will see the potential? As far as network marketing tips go, these three were the biggest A-ha moments for me. The principles I'll cover here are: |
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Top Home Business Training With Tom Challan
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| If you are serious about your home business, you will seek out home business training. It separates the leaders from the followers. Working with Tom Challan will impact your life more than you could ever imagine.
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Network Marketing Successful Home Meeting: 5 Tactical Steps
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| Here is a step-by-step formula to follow to run a successful network marketing home meeting. Using this simple formula to present your mlm business opportunity in your own living room will greatly enhance member sign-ups into your network marketing business. |
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Network Marketing MLM Home Business:How To Really Make Money With 3 Simple Actions
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| How do you really make money in a network marketing mlm home business? I can tell you its not a bunch of mumbo jumbo that the "crowd" is talking about. |
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Does a Network Marketing Home Based Business Work?
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| There are a few main points to consider here: Follow-through, relationships, systems, and serving others. The opportunity you choose will of course will play its part, but it is not the main player that will contribute to making network marketing work. |
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Home Based Business - Getting to Yes With Prospects
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| In a home based business you must relentlessly make efforts to get the clients to choose your products and services. You have to make your business related activities so attractive to your customers that they willingly start using them. Getting your prospects to mentally answer yes and to submit their order for your products and/or to at least send you their contact information is critical to ensuring the success of your home based business.
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Increase Your Sales: Stop Chasing Clients with a New Approach to Selling
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| Let's talk about the ways in which you can generate revenue and increase your sales. There are three ways that traditional salespeople do this. Let's explore a more effective alternative.
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Three Stages of a Sales Agent
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| Sales agents and advisors have a life cycle, similar to that of the life cycle of a franchisee. There's a beginning stage, an intermediate stage, and the final result stage. Most agents and advisors behave in a similar fashion during the first two stages, but their behavior can differ dramatically in the final result stage. But I'm getting ahead of myself… |
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Five Simple Steps to Network Marketing Success That Are Essential to Your Business Plan
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| If you've just recently started a network marketing business or perhaps you're an old hand looking for a little bit of guidance here's my quick list of five simple steps to network marketing success. Apply these steps as part of your business plan and you will begin to see results in a matter of weeks. |
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Found Your True Calling (To Action)?
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| You already know that every time you market your business, you need to include a call to action. A reason for someone to contact you now. Where should you place it? How should you phrase the call? |
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Client Buying States
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| Selling can get quite confusing sometimes. Prospects or clients saying one thing and doing another. It’s hard enough that you put in all that effort and have your sale go nowhere.
It might help you to know, if you don’t already, when selling that there are mainly four different Buying States. They are classified as :
1. Opportunity
2. Problem
3. Static
4. Blinkered
Two Buying States show that a sale is possible.
Two Buying States show that a sale may be difficult or unlikely. |
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Locating Prospects
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| In the sea of information that is the internet and the ever growing networked communities we live in, you could essentially get a sales lead from anywhere. In principal this sound great. You always have someone to call on or prospect too.
However having too many choices can often lead to feelings of being overwhelmed by too much information. And when you have too much information this can lead to indecision and subsequently inaction. And inaction is the NUMBER 1 killer of any sales prospecting strategy. |
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Writing Articles; STILL One of the Best Ways to Invest In Your Success
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| Have you ever heard the phrase, “content rich”? Well, when writing your way to wealth, writing an article that showcases your expertise is like investing in a sure thing. Writers (both online and off) have used articles to get traffic on the web, entice prospects to call, and sell their books and products. But with Twitter, LinkedIn, and other fun places to market your services online, is writing articles still a worthwhile strategy? Absolutely. |
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Work at home Secrets Reveal Best Home Based Business Tips
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| Mastery is just solid business practices that have been dependable over years of hard work and education. Affiliate marketing programs are affordable, easy to join and implement. The economic uncertainty has people looking at ways to earn income. Being in a home based business is not that hard now with the internet at your disposable. |
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How to Start Your Own Business: What Does It Take to Create a Solid Business Presence Online?
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| When figuring out how to start your own business there are a lot of things that need to be considered, but one of the biggest things that must be conquered is how you are going to position yourself as a likable, trustworthy authority in the industry you're tackling. The question remains, though, if you're barely figuring out how to start your own business online how are you going to compete with people who have years of business experience on you? Here are some steps that need to be taken to have people see you as that trusted authority so you can thrive in your new endeavor, from creating your marketing campaign to talking to your prospects one on one. |
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Does Your Team have the Right Sales Plan?
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| Salesplans |
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Sell More Now
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| You can sell more in this economy...really! |
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What To Avoid In Your MLM Home Business!
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| Would you like more results in your MLM Home Business? Of course you would. Unfortunately 97% of people online are failing and getting no results. Most likely it's because they don't know what to avoid if they want successful in their business and this gives them no chance to succeed. Read this article by Omari Taylor and discover what to avoid in your MLM home business to guarantee your success. |
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Do You Need a Website for Affiliate Marketing?
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| The most important and indispensable thing to assure your success in affiliate marketing is your own website. The first step in any successful affiliate marketing business is building a good, credible and professional looking website. |
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How to Set Up Gmail to Autorespond
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| This is a nice way to automatically respond to certain emails you get so that you can contact your prospects in your affiliate program.
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Looking to 2010: Marketing Advice for Small Business Guerrillas
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| OK, so 2008 and 2009 were not good years for small businesses. Demand was soft, those customers, who could pay, did so slowly, banks and other sources were very stingy with credit. If you made it this far, what should Marketing Guerrillas be doing looking at twentyten? Here are five specific recommendations based on the book, MORE Guerrilla Marketing Research. The key idea in the book is that when Guerrillas have a marketing problem, they should ask their customers and prospects for advice. Doing this will produce a better decision than going it alone--every time.
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Recruiting Tips In Network Marketing
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| Networking marketing is about selling and recruiting to be successful at it. More emphasis is given on building your network than in selling. Prospecting is a process by which you find the right people who will listen to you talk about your business. |
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4 Network Marketing Strategies
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| If you are into network marketing, you need to have your own personal marketing strategies to achieve your goals. While there are trainings and seminars from which the potential clients and down line prospects can learn from, you still need to find ways to make their appearance on the said events. |
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Using Technology For Network Marketing
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| The technology is an excellent medium to facilitate all your strategies to achieve goals for network marketing. The Internet itself provides numerous tools to enhance your marketing strategy. |
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7 Tips to find the best network marketing opportunity
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| Only few individuals become self-made millionaires in Network Marketing. It takes more than the traits, values and skills to earn your first million dollars. However, no matter the challenges, there are truly individuals who can find millions in multi-level companies. Here are 7 tips to make it a success. |
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Increase Your Sales with Actionable Emails
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| I hate long emails. They take too long to read and typically include action items I just don’t have time for. No doubt you’ve experienced it, too. Your customers are no different and it’s impacting your ability to close sales. |
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How to Write Articles that Attract Ideal Clients
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| Writing and publishing articles, as long as they relate to your area of expertise, will always result in traffic to your web site. However, not all those visitors will become clients, or even prospects. Why? Because oftentimes they don't find what they're looking for. But this can be avoided. |
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Plastic Surgery Marketing Strategies - How to Write Google Ads that Get New Patients
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| On your Google ad have some psychological or emotional trigger within your ad copy that grabs prospective patients by the eyeballs and pulls them to your website... |
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Top 7 Reasons Sales Managers Fail
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| Have you been scratching your head wondering why your sales team is not hitting revenue goals and aren't going to succumb to blaming the economy? Do you feel like you're doing everything you can and giving your all as a manager but are not getting consistent results? Read on to determine if you are a product of these 7 reasons sales managers fail.
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Stop Wasting Your Time Chasing Network Marketing Prospects-Have Them Come To You
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| Learn the secret of getting an endless supply of network marketing prospects. Stop chasing your friends and family and start attracting quality people to your business. |
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Key Account Sales - More Than Just Important Accounts
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| Over the last several months I have engaged in several on line disagreements about the importance of asking questions early in the sales process. More than one sales expert has claimed that asking questions violates trust. More than one marketing expert has claimed that asking questions is offensive. |
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Selling Isn't Rocket Science
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| Much like rocket science, when it comes to making the sale, the littlest thing can mean success or disaster. |
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Social Media Marketing - 7 Ways to Explode Your Authority
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| Have you ever asked yourself if social media is important for you business? The answer is without a doubt YES! You can say whatever you want, but in the end of the day people choose to follow you as a leader. They don't really care about what the product is or what the opportunity is all about. If people see you as a authority and as a person with real meanings and true values, that what they are going to buy in to. |
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TRADE SHOW FOLLOW-UP: HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?
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| Trade shows are great for meeting new prospects and lead generation. But the real value is in the follow-up. But how much is too much? Here are four tips to keep in mind when trying to turn all those business cards into cash. |
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8 Strategies for Bypassing Voice Mail
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| Tired of getting voicemail all the time. Here are some tips for bypassing voicemail. |
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Social media marketing - How to use Twitter to find prospects for your business
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| Do you consider using or are you using twitter to market your business? Twitter is growing rapidly and is now one of the most visited sites on the internet. Twitter is a wonderful social media site and has endless possibilities even dough it looks and is in fact really simple. There is a large amount of software available for Twitter, both payed and free and a lot of courses that claims to explode your following. If you learn how to use Twitter you can drive a huge amount of quality traffic to your site. |
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7th of the 10 Kurlan Sales Competencies that are Key to Building a Sales Culture
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| Salespeople love to present options. It makes them feel like they have more chances to win the business. It's such a popular approach that it's one of the few parts of the sales process that is universally accepted and named. You know it as Good, Better and Best. Companies actually have alignment on Good, Better and Best, sometimes using it in their retail stores and catalogs to provide category options. How many times have salespeople presented you with 3 options? Just last week, I was presented with 3 options at the Lexus Dealer where I got my LS460. |
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Increase Blog Subscribers in 7 Easy Steps
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| Now that you have gone live with your blog, what’s next? How will you know if it is successful; how will you know if you are delivering the content your readers, your prospects and your clients are after? You will definitely want to monitor your pageviews, traffic, clickthroughs, search engine rankings and other overall indicators of website success. Your number of blog subscribers, however, may be the most accurate and reliable measurement you have for determining the success of your blog. |
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Giving Employees a Test Run Before Hiring
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| Be gone with staid interviewing questions, behavioral “what ifs” and real-life simulations. Just put the candidate to work and see for yourself firsthand whether he/she is actually what he/she claims to be. Not that all other techniques should be done away with entirely, but at least with a pre-hire trial approach, decisions don’t need to be solely dependent on a set of variables that are tenuous at best. |
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Video Marketing Success-Show your customer and prospects “reality-style” videos of who you are and what you do….and engage your audience to buy!
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| Being referred by some as the “newest marketing revolution”, video marketing is definitely gaining a lot of popular audience. So what is it that sets video marketing apart from other marketing paradigms? |
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3 Attraction Marketing keys that will Help Expand Your MLM Business
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| MLMers have seen the benefits that attraction marketing provides and are all out to enjoy its advantages. The internet is playing a major role in attracting leads to your MLM business rather than roping in your family members. With the advantages of the internet being available at your disposal there is going to be a major turn in the way MLM business works. |
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Using Attraction Marketing to Succeed in your MLM Business
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| Using the correct attraction marketing strategy can make you very successful in the MLM business. Today, with the advancement of technology in this business, the old methods of doing MLM business will not help your network grow. Utilizing attraction marketing will help you make your business a successful one.
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3 Important Marketing Strategies for a Successful MLM business
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| With the help of attraction marketing, MLM business has found a new success plan and most are still unaware of this. The old method of building your network by bringing in your family members and close friends are now a thing of the past. |
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Teach your Sales Team to Qualify and Sales will Increase
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| Qualifying leads in its easiest form |
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Attention SendOutCards Distributors: Be the "Microsoft" of the "Hallmark" Globe
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| If you are a SendOutCards Distributor of if you're taking into consideration a SendOutCards opportunity, read this to begin with! Learn first hand what could be the prime opportunity with this up and coming opportunity.
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Be seen as the industry expert by using personal branding in your online marketing
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| Personal branding is commonly talked about in online marketing. You will need to set up your website as "You, Inc.". This establishes you as the industry expert and does a far better job of promoting your business than using a replicated company website. |
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Create Headlines That Raise the Dead in Home Business
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| The first thing your reader sees can mean the difference between success and failure. If it comes across as boring or not even half-assed related to what they want, prospects won't give it a flying chance. |
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Do You Make These Stupid Mistakes For Your Web Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
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| If you are doing these stupid search engine web marketing mistakes, then it may be one of the reasons why you are broke and frustrated trying to leave this business! You must do an EDUCATED web search engine optimization all the time. Period! |
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How to avoid MLM lead deprivation and have 50 people a day hunt you down
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| Every MLM person has been in lead deprivation at one point or another. You can buck the traditional methods of chasing people down, and attract people to you, and set yourself up as a leader in the process. There are a few simple steps that you can follow.
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Newsletters by Numbers - Stuff Every Newsletter Must Have
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| A roadmap to follow if you want your customer newsletter to be as effective as can be. |
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10 Article Templates to Overcome Writer's Block Fast So You Can Write Your Articles in 30 Minutes
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| Do you suffer from writer's block? Do you take too long to write articles? In this article, you will get 10 different article writing templates from an article marketing master. |
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Article Marketers - Stop Insulting Your Targeted Audience When You Write & Submit Articles Online
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| If you write articles or website content that's not geared for your targeted audience, people will leave... discover 3 Mistakes most Article Marketers make that insult their audience... |
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Top 10 Reasons Why You Need A Killer Elevator Speech
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| It is my firm belief that virtually every person in business for her- or himself needs a killer elevator speech. Yes, that means you, too. Wondering why a killer elevator speech is so important for you? See if you recognize yourself in any of these scenarios: |
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5 Network Marketing / MLM Intensive Care Actions You Must Take After You Sponsor A New Rep Into Your Business Before Their 63rd Day
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| For the average new network marketer, we only have 63 days to assist that new rep to make money. You, as the sponsor, should pull out all stops to assist the new rep in making some cash back from his/her home based business. |
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How Bullet Points Help Generate Leads For Work From Home Opportunities
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| When promoting work from home opportunities using sales pages you need to be sure you effectively use bullet points. Bullet points help you to craft your offer in a way that is appealing for your website visitors. These are some tips that will help you to effectively use bullet points so that your website will get the maximum response. |
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3 basic steps to finding & developing top prospects
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| 1. Prospect Generation: How to develop more good prospects
2. Prospect Qualification: How to identify more REAL prospects
3. Prospect Development: How to cultivate prospects so they'll choose to buy from you |
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8 Ways to Make More Money by Writing and Publishing
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| Writing for print and online publication can generate new business leads, drive traffic to your site, build relationships with your clients and prospects, and attract an audience. If you need to grow your business, consider the following ways to get your byline out there. |
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What are the benefits of a CRM system in your business? Part 2
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| Sales reps often represent the "face" of your company. In order for them to do their part in driving outstanding sales results, they should be empowered to put their best foot forward when representing their company. To do this, a Sales Automation or CRM needs to be in tune with their needs. Putting their best foot forward is going to mean many things.
Further to this I would like to add that a CRM should also be in tune with your customers needs helping them have the best experience they can have with you. |
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