We’re sending out a quick note to make sure everybody knows about a new seminar were putting on this month. Sales and marketing are like two horses that are pulling your business along. If they’re both pulling in the same direction, you can really move. If they are pulling in different directions, you won’t get anywhere. So how do you align your marketing message and sales?
This 90 minute seminar helps you examine each of your buyer’s personas, what their triggers are and how your product or service aligns with your buyer’s pain. Taking the time to identify your buyer’s challenges helps make sure your marketing message is lining up with your sales message. In this interactive seminar you’ll:
Identify your buyers
Identify three personas of your buyers
Learn the language of your buyers
Compare product/service capabilities
Create messages to match your buyer personas
75 minute seminar with 15 Q&A afterward. Come ready to work! Get registered now. T6FVKXN7DGC5
We talk a lot about how your marketing and sales must mesh together well. In fact, this month on the 25th, we have a workshop to help you align marketing and sales. Likewise, we talk a lot about Twitter (you can follow me @silversquare if you’re not already). So, I thought it would only be appropriate to give you some tips on using Twitter for your sales effort. Here are some easy places to start thinking about how Twitter can help you sell.
Research. Yep, I love using Twitter for research. I use it for sales, personal, marketing, business advice. I use Twitter more often for research than I do google. The minimal effort of deciding if I want to read more (ah, the true beauty of 140 characters or less!) before hitting a link is great. The fact that just about everything is recent and relevant to what’s happening in the world right now is even better.
Industry news. I have admitted I am a news junkie, but Twitter makes it a lot easier to stay up on what trends are taking place in my industry, or a client’s industry I’m monitoring for them, or, an industry I’m trying to break in to. We all know knowledge is power. Take that power in small, relevant doses and who knows where you’ll go.
Best time to call. Oh yes. Once you start following people, you’ll learn where they are traveling, what time of the day they are most often on Twitter, i.e. what time they may be at their office in front of their computer, and if they will attend or be somewhere you can connect with them or share in an experience. Learn about your prospect, professionally and personally.
Job change. I recently learned of a friend’s super big job change from Twitter. It’s where they decided to put the news. I also see what other friends and clients are jumping around from place to place. I have worked with clients as they have moved from business to business, so keeping up on where they are and what new needs they may have is important.
I’m sure some of you can think of other ways you’re using Twitter in your sales process. Drop us a comment and let us learn from your greatness!
Today’s post is from guest author Aaron Prickel. Aaron is a sales trainer and executive coach with Lushin & Associates.
When looking at leads that come in from marketing efforts, they can come in various flavors. What stands out in this particular example, is this is a HOT lead. A prospect who is actually excited to talk to you, they appear to be enthusiastic about your product or service and looking to make a change for various reasons. I will say this before I continue and I want you to remember this……positive prospects are the most dangerous prospects! Why? Sometimes we feel like we can cut corners because they are “excited” or “ready to buy.” We skip a step in our normal process or don’t ask the difficult questions because we don’t want to upset this hot lead!
If handled incorrectly, these positive prospects are the ones you think are in the bag, you send the quote and everything needed from your end and you never hear from them again. You scratch your head and say to yourself “I don’t get it, they said they loved what we had and were probably going to do something.” Sound familiar?
Here are a few things to help turn this hot lead into a client:
Set expectations early- discuss with the prospect what they are looking to get out of the initial call. Remember: you can’t get mad at a prospect for doing something you didn’t tell them they couldn’t do.
Find out their true compelling reasons to change- The change could be going from nothing to your product, or from a competitor to your product. Regardless, figure out why they think they need to change and the impact the problems are having.
Determine decision process-understanding who and how they are going to decide is crucial. This will help you decide if the prospect is even a good fit from your end.
These are just a few small steps you can take to ensure you help turn a hot lead into a paying client. Remember this key phrase as well: How you sell is a sample of how you solve. If your sales process is sloppy or you skip steps on the front end, what are they going to think about the back end of your business?
We have talked about being behind if you’re not already constantly creating fresh content for your company and brand, but one area that’s often omitted from the social media conversation is the power of networking.
I had the pleasure of having lunch today with the executive director of the 4H Foundation (I forgot to tell her about my holly hobby easy bake oven explosion, that’s one good story) and I shared as much as one can in a lunch timeframe about the power of social media… for networking. By the end of lunch I think I had her convinced that one of her next steps is creating a ‘place’ for all of those long lost 4H friends to meet up and catch up… and thereby creating a pool of potential donors for her to reach out to.
Networking is a marketing function. It is! Don’t forget this in your marketing effort. As we teach in our twitter guide, social media puts networking on steroids. It’s a platform that allows you to leverage your time to connect with many, many people; moreso than you could face-to-face (especially on that geography factor!). That being said, it’s not enough to just talk, you must begin, join and share in conversations. Go share!
They’re talking about you on Twitter. They’re talking about you on Facebook. They share an experience on a blog post. They use Flickr to post a gallery of photos from your event. It’s happening, and you need to listen.
So often marketing discussions lean toward what activity should be done next. What should be implemented? What tactics should launch next? What should we present this fall? How should we run our campaign for Q1? Sometimes, it’s simply better to listen.
As the marketing outlets available continue to grow at a remarkable pace, with albeit sometimes not as remarkable means, it gets overwhelming. I’ve noticed more often than not that our clients get caught up in what to do next. They read of the next new thing and they think and tell their marketing partner, we have to be here. Get us a plan for working this medium. Really, though, we need to put listening parallel to this push activity in order to really create value in our respective markets.
Step one in all marketing planning should include active listening. Monitor your brand, monitor your market’s activity and trends, monitor your competition, keep an ear to the ground on it all. There is so much value on understanding the needs in your market and then creating a specific plan, product or service to meeting those needs, that it rarely happens anymore. When Apple set out to create and market their iPod, they listened to the need in the market place. They knew there were people out there who wanted to have their 10,000 CDs with them to play on demand, but that they didn’t want to carry them around. They listened to the need and filled it.
We have to begin conditioning ourselves to recognize, account for an reach that need in each of our respective fields. Finding that need doesn’t happen from pushing your product and service more often or in a different way. It happens from listening.
We have been working with Nicole Bickett from Vision Bridge to help with build processes for our business. The value, motivation and energy our entire team has received from this experience is overwhelming. Who knew establishing processes for Silver Square could have such the impact it’s had. I knew it would be worth our time, knew it would benefit us all, but the bonus in the experience has been the excitment and renewed path Silver Square is developing.
Marketing as a Process by Nicole Bickett
Marketing is exciting. It is the part of our business that allows us to let our creative juices to flow and brings us hope about all of the new sales we will receive from our efforts. But as energizing and exciting as marketing is, just like anything else, marketing is most successful when it follows a systematized process.
Many of us try the newest latest and greatest in hopes that a new marketing tactic will be the answer, but marketing usually isn’t about one tactic or idea that becomes a smash hit. On average, a customer must hear, see, or experience your product seven times before they make a purchase. In order to get the most out of your marketing efforts, it must consist of regular, consistent communication over time. In other words, you must create a system that delivers to your target market on a regular basis.
Here are some ideas to get started:
Team. Gather your team in a room and reevaluate your target market and where they spend their time. Who is buying your product or service? What websites do they visit? What periodicals do they read? What blogs do they follow? Include recent surveys from customers that ask how they learned about your company.
Whiteboard. Write out each of the ways you can think of that prospects and customers have heard about you. Are there other ways they could learn more about your company that you haven’t explored? Brainstorm new ideas based on the information you learned about your target market. If you feel lost, marketing gurus (like the brainiacs at Silver Square) can help. Here’s a start: 91 ways… (ed: a recent edition of the Silver Square newsletter included a feature called 91 Ways to Revitalize Your Marketing)
Strategy. Pick the ideas that will give you the most bang for your buck. Note that you may not know what those are yet! You will want to be sure that you complete the activities for a specified amount of time (more than once!) and track their success. Start by using a marketing calendar. Take your variety of ideas and put them into regular intervals on the calendar. Here’s a link to a free one you can download for 2009: http://www.brandeo.com/node/1135.
Document. Don’t reinvent the wheel each time you complete a marketing tactic. Write down the steps it takes to complete it and, if you can, delegate it to someone else to continue the activity regularly. This allows you to focus on other high value efforts.
Track! This is the most important part of the process. You cannot know the success of your efforts unless you track them. E-mail marketing makes this easy as you can watch open and click-through rates. Set up a system where your salespeople consistently ask each new prospect how they heard about your company. Track the information on a spreadsheet (or other method such as your CRM) and evaluate the marketing efforts with the highest success. Then add and delete tactics based on this evaluation.
By looking at marketing as a process, you will stop wasting money on hit or miss activities and start spending your valuable time and money where it matters most. Good luck!
On Monday, July 24th, on the Today show, this video was shown about a wedding couple/party rockin it down the isle. It was so fun to watch I have to share it here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WVI1Xc6Z2Q
Really, though, what this tells me is that anything goes. The Internets (love saying that word) has truly opened the door for us all to see how others live, how others buy, learn what people read, understand how people relate, and mix and mingle with people who are like-minded but that you never would have met in your otherwise daily life. The door is more open than ever before to be your own leader, do your own thing and march to your own drum.
Take this in a business snapshot. How can you twist it up? In your business, what is the typical way you would ‘walk down the isle’ and how could adding a twist change the experience for your clients? It’s definitely worthy of considering, and even trying, and I dare say, it’s even now perfectly acceptable. Mix it up!
We have had a lot of conversations of late about helping companies know what they sell. To know your audience and how they buy, you need to know what they are buying. This helps you know how to sell. Ask yourself this question: “What does our company sell?” and gather answers from everyone, even your clients if you can. Any surprising answers? I’ll give you a hint on the direction; it’s probably not a product or service.
Let’s take a company example in Vera Bradley. (I was disappointed in their message on their website but I’ll stay focused to the task for now) They are running a print campaign, in some national publications even a full spread, that says ‘Make life more colorful’ with a very colorful image of a youngish woman in a hot air balloon holding one of their newer fabric backpacks. The name of the pack and the price are small and insignificant to the ad. The ad is selling a lifestyle. It’s selling add some flavor to your life by adding color. Be rich with color and exude the beauty and wonder that this woman and hot air balloon are doing for you right now. It has very little to do with that backpack. Vera Bradley knows their audience has a certain lifestyle and approach to life that makes their product, i.e. handbags and such, part of that life. If they wanted to just move some product they could have lots of thumbnail shots of each new bag with a price under it and their website.
Let’s also talk about that price. The backpack was $92. If the whole ad would have been about the product with the price, in today’s economy, that may give some people sticker shock. We all know a solid backpack can be found for much less than $92. Selling the lifestyle makes the price less glaring and less painful. While some would not like to admit it, there is a price tag for certain lifestyles. Vera Bradley knows this and is banking on knowing which category their audience is in and their appropriate price tag.
Now on to their website. This is where I was disappointed. No mention of color in my world, even, (even!) lack of colorful imagery on their site. The people on the homepage were much younger than the woman in the ad, which can go OK or terribly wrong depending on the audience you’re starting with. They didn’t bring the campaign home and speak to me once I went to their site to make a purchase. This is sad. This would be the part I would suggesting making sure you don’t repeat and tie in the right online message to your offline world.
I tend to ask a lot of questions. This either gets me in trouble, gets me thinking or gets me a new idea. Regardless of my outcome, along the way, I’m often told I’m very curious. I typically take this as a compliment, since I genuinely AM asking my questions to know more or to know an answer. And while I cannot tell you it’s necessarily what makes us great at Silver Square, I have a hunch it’s part of our magic.
When you’re working in marketing, you need to know how things tick. You need to know what matters to the audience and why. You need to know these things on a very large scale in order to best reach and speak with those you want to help or work with. Lumping your audience in to one large pile claiming they are this way and only this way isn’t going to speak to anyone. Here are some things to think about when you need to know more…
Play a game with yourself and make sure you ask at least three follow up questions to every topic. It can be why, can you tell me more or how did you come to this conclusion. Whatever they are, ask. I promise you’ll start to know more and understand more than you ever would have while stopping at just one or two. Often, for me, that third question really brings the ah ha moment or oh, that’s what you mean or that’s where this is going. Try it out. If you get really good you could go for more questions, but don’t be annoying. This can be a fine line to walk. If you really want to know the answer though, keep pressing.
Some sales trainers will teach you to answer every question with a question. I usually do this not because I was taught, but because I learned from my first tip that you probably don’t have all the answers you need to actually answer the question. Learn more. Always.
Don’t let your definition of a word account for your audience’s meaning of the word. Let’s take the word large. You’ll almost always hear me ask “what does large mean” when someone uses that word with me. I have no idea what large means to that person; but I do know it’s probably not the same way I would define large.
Work on being curious and see how it impacts how you speak to your audience.
I attended a Vistage meeting last week and made the commitment to call some of my clients and find out what they can buy from Silver Square that they cannot get anywhere else. The goal in this exercise is to understand what our clients are thinking about us, because really, it doesn’t matter what we think we do well or bring to the market place, it’s what our clients think we do well and bring to the market place.
When we work with a new client, we work hard to get inside the minds of what their clients think about them; do they have the time to read long newsletters, are they even in front of their computers all day, do they enjoy being outside, do they care about keeping up with the industry news, do coupons motivate them, does a freebie now and then build loyalty? We understand this practice, but we haven’t done super well at monitoring it for our own clients.
In our communication audit and marketing plan services, one of the steps in the process are to speak with clients about their thoughts and feelings on the client’s work, style, value, etc. We also facilitate a one hour strategy session with employees, sorry leadership team, you’re not invited, to further gather information about what makes the client tick and how the strategy of the company is or isn’t hitting that mark.
I challenge you to think about how your clients are thinking. If you’re not 100 percent sure what they think (which you won’t be) you need to begin asking. Make the time to work on youself, it will pay off!
