Sign in
Courtesy navigation
Search
Blog posts tagged sales
Our take on networking
July 26, 2010
Networking is a great and powerful way to meet people, get your name and business cards out there and even win some new business. We've done our fair share of networking now, and quite successfully, but it's always surprising that some business people out there make a few mistakes that are a huge turn off.
Here are top tips, do's and don'ts from your team at ahp design:
- Do you have an elevator pitch prepared? Is it exciting and interesting or do people start looking around the room for their next target? I'm not saying it has to be the world's best motivational speech, but show your passion, know what you are talking about, know your business and read people's signals. If they start to wander, ask an open ended question - people love talking about themselves.
- A footnote on the elevator pitch - don't take a hard sell approach. Networking is about building relationships. The hard sell will inevitably put people off you right away (huge personal bug bear).
- Set yourself a goal or work rate. Yeah, the free nibbles and drinks are great but what's the point if you don't come away with meaningful connections?
- Make sure you have business cards to hand and also make sure that they are quality!
- Be polite. No one minds if you join their little conversation if you're polite. Read the signals: are they standing in a closed circuit excluding everyone else from joining in? If not, then a "Hello, may I join you?" will go a long way.
- Please please please refrain from garlic the night before and brush your teeth. Yes it's common sense but you'd be surprised!
- Be positive and get off your soap box. Do not take networking as an opportunity to air your gripes about the world, the economy and the government. We get enough of that all day, every day, thank you very much.
- Ready for the kicker... follow up. If you've had a great conversation with some one, follow it up with a phone call, email or whatever feels right. Add your new connections on LinkedIn and Twitter to reinforce your acquaintance.
- Above all of this, be yourself.
Now go and find yourselves some networking events to attend, go to as many as you can until you find ones that you enjoy and are worthwhile, and then stick with it. It's not a quick win but it will help your business.
Have fun...
What shape is your marketing budget?
June 30, 2010
The questions I most often get asked about marketing budgets are:
- How much should I spend as a percentage of turnover?
- Should I benchmark against competitors?
- How much shall I spend on each discipline (PR, DM, Events, Ads, etc.)?
All totally reasonable questions… but what you should be asking is: what shape should my marketing budget be? Seriously, it is the most important question there is on the budgeting front. So, let me tell you what I mean.
A decent marketing programme is centred on a sales funnel, onto which you’ve mapped the decision making process for your target audience. (see previous posts Making Marketing Pay, and What to Say When).
Fig1: Chart to show the influence of marketing spend across the sales funnel
From this you can put together a programme of activity that moves a person from awareness to a sale. Each marketing technique has a different level of influence at each stage of this process. You need to determine the level of influence at each stage, then apportion this across the funnel.
There are a few ways to decide the amount of influence each technique has:
- Workshop with the sales and marketing team to agree the apportionment
- Surveys or focus groups amongst new customers to get them to assess what they saw at each stage (this can be tricky, as people often post-rationalise decision-making, meaning that emotional triggers are downplayed)
- A best guess (hey, we’ve all got to start somewhere)
- A combination of all of the above.
From this exercise you now have a powerful tool for designing programmes and allocating budget. Now analyse your budget in the same way:
- Split your spend into each technique
- Apportion this spend as per the influence amount you’ve worked out for that technique (for example, if you worked out that PR has 40% influence at awareness, 10 per cent at interest, etc. your spend on PR should be tabulated to reflect that)
- You now have an actual shape for your budget
Compare your actual budget shape to the ideal budget shape you’ve established to maintain a free-flowing sales funnel. This allows you assess where you’re spending too much or too little, and to adjust your spend according to the funnel requirements.
Now, if you have a budget cut, or find a pot of cash, you again have a powerful tool to decide how to adjust your spending. The crucial factor here is to maintain the shape. So, rather than cutting a project that happens to be the right level of spend, you can cut evenly across the funnel ensuring that you’re not leaving any gaps.
- Article originally appeared on Clear-Thought.co.uk
Ten steps to creating a powerful Facebook page
May 18, 2010
Facebook won't suddenly transform your business into a superstar sales machine. But it can help you win friends and influence people. But like anything else in life, this is about commitment, effort and starting on the right footing.
A lot of people still get sucked into the idea of thinking "if we build, they will come". And doubly so with Facebook — just because there's a huge audience, it doesn't mean everyone is suddenly going to beat a path to your door!
So it's as well to begin with the basics — think long term, trust in your network of friends and stay focused. With that in mind, here's my ten steps to create a powerful Facebook page:
- Start by creating a page for your business. If you're a business-to-consumer company and you have a product / service, you should create a page and build a community around your brand(s). There are different options for pages, so be sure to pick the right ones. You also have the option to add things like a discussions tab, which is ideal for managing customer feedback.
- People love photos, so be sure to post pictures of you and your team both at work and play! You want to connect with your followers, and this is a great way to demonstrate you're real folk, just like everyone else. Also, don't forget to tag your friends in those photos, which will help broaden the exposure of your page.
- Quality, not quantity. It's vital that you keep in mind that this is all about attracting the right people. So it's far better to have just 10 people join your page and have five comment and / or share than have 100 people join and only have the same 5 actually interacting. Be sure to focus on people who are relevant to your business and those that may benefit from your page.
- Make use of your contacts on Facebook. When you're looking to build up some momentum ahead of a release, use your presence to create buzz with small teasers with your status updates. If each friend or colleague has, on average, 100 friends, then just ten of them joining your page and sharing something you post means you are potentially exposed to a thousand more people.
- Generate some buzz and be a tease! Just won a new client? Build on that success and let people know. Be brief and quickly outline what you'll be doing for them. Who knows, someone might pick up on your message and call for more details. And when you've got that exciting new article lined up, post a teasing message and see who bites with an enquiring comment.
- Give praise and recognition to your Facebook friends who suggest news, related articles, or who have perhaps even written articles for your company blog. Even better, in the message part, use the @ symbol and then type their name to tag them in the shared item. That way, you're giving them some added exposure. You could score some extra points by tagging a Page of theirs the same way.
- If you can't be engaging, be informative. It's not easy being engaging, especially when writing. So if you struggle, make sure you're informative and helpful. Think of the people who are following your page and share relevant content. Also, consider adding a note in the comment area and ask a question or two, to encourage discussion and debate.
- Create your own page tab. This will stretch the skills of many, but it's easily accomplished with the help of your web designer. Perhaps you have a portfolio page and you'd like to show off your work? Or maybe you want a snazzy graphic to use as the default tab people see when they come to your page? Either way, you can do all of this quite easily, without too much fuss.
- Put a link to your page on your company website, ideally on your contact page or in the footer of your blog pages. This way, when people visit your website, you're driving them towards your page and your burgeoning community.
- Get your own page URL name. If you have a page with more than 25 fans, you can get a nice URL name, like the one for Octane, which is facebook.com/octaneinteractive. Just go to the username selection page and choose your name now. Why bother? Facebook is a hugely popular website and ranks very highly on the search engines. So there's a good chance people could find your page on Facebook when they're searching for your business.
Hopefully, that all makes perfect sense and you're inspired enough to venture forth and create an amazing page for your company. And be sure to come back and tell me how you got on!
35 things I have found to be almost always true
May 12, 2010
- Relevance matters more than originality
- The most important element in any creative endeavour is the brief
- Most clients focus on the wrong things
- The urgent takes precedence over the important
- The customer you want is like the customer you’ve got
- The product and positioning matter more than any other element in marketing
- Who you are talking to matters more than what you sell
- Database is the heart of marketing
- The internet is just accelerated direct marketing
- Emotion matters more than logic
- The simple letter or email gives the best ROI
- Long copy beats short
- Incentives always pay
- Segmentation is almost invariably worth it
- Hardly anyone budgets for marketing intelligently
- The customer you’ve got is 4 – 5 times more likely to buy from you than someone identical who is not a customer.
- A previous enquirer is about twice as likely to buy
- A past customer is usually your next best bet.
- After that comes someone who’s recommended
- It pays to say thank you
- Marketers are suckers for magic bullets
- Marketing experts complicate things needlessly
- If you say why you are writing, response goes up
- Questionnaires almost always pay
- Making people choose increases response
- Few marketers use enough testimonials
- Almost all meetings waste time
- Flattery and greed are the two biggest draws
- All successful messages solve problems
- Sincerity always pays
- Few messages ask forcefully enough for action
- Repetition pays
- People’s faces raise response
- The more you communicate, the better you do
- Research rarely predicts results accurately
Drayton Bird is a renowned direct marketing teacher, speaker and author. Find out more about him on his profile.
Two ways to add to experiences through communication
April 29, 2010
To heighten an experience you can create expectations and/or you can condition the experience.
- To heighten an experience can be fairly straightforward. For instance, you tell the customer what to look for.
E.g. Wines2You, the wholesale organic wine importer, include tasting notes with their wines stating things like ‘notice the flavours of buttered toast, some say slightly burnt toast’. Suddenly the client tunes in to these flavours and probably passes on this titbit of information to friends when drinking the wine. - To condition the experience you need to add a creative idea. This adds to the experience, often in terms of romance or mystique.
E.g. Wines2You tasting notes go on to say how Keith, the owner of Wines2You, first met Enrique, the owner of the vineyard, early one scorching summer’s morning in the northernmost part of Spain, celebrating the birth of his first child in one of the sixteenth century caves at his smallholding…
It adds to the “sizzle and the steak”.
Five tips for a successful product launch
March 08, 2010
I have recently been spending a lot of time thinking about product launches. My employer, SellerDeck, is a few weeks away from rolling out a major update to one of its ecommerce software products. While we have the advantage of an existing user base, many of the fundamentals for launching are the same whether it is an existing product or something completely new.
1. Understand the Unique Value Proposition
If your product is sat on the launch pad I would hope by this stage you know what it is that makes your offering different from the rest. The importance of your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) cannot be understated; it’s the lifeblood of any product launch. Review, discuss and research until you are totally convinced you have got it right; you only get one launch window.
2. Talk to prospective customers
Get out there and talk to the very people you want to sell your product to. Discuss your plans for the product, both now and in the future. Get their feedback; it could be you missed something.
3. How are you going to sell and market?
Choosing where to market your product can be difficult. Make informed decisions based on research. It might even be a good idea to run several small pilot schemes to see where you get the most success. However prepare to be ruthless if you’re not seeing the results. It’s easier to make decisions before you have spent the entire budget on something that’s not working.
4. Make yourself heard
Find out who the influential people are in your space and hustle, annoy and pester them. That is until you get a chance to demonstrate why your product is the best. Nothing is better than a personal recommendation regardless of the product or service. Go to events, chat to people and network, network, network!
5. Bring the whole team on the journey
A successful product launch requires commitment and understanding throughout your organisation.
When President Kennedy visited NASA in 1961 he came across a cleaner, and asked him what his job was. The cleaner replied “My Job is to put a man on the moon, Sir”. Now that probably is the greatest launch of all time.
Small business marketing - free advice, tools and resources | Marketing Donut
Copyright © 2009-2013
