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Blog posts tagged sales
Local businesses must seize low-risk advertising opportunities
July 01, 2009
Local press has been having a torrid time of it lately. It seems that scarcely a week goes by without reports of more problems for titles and groups within the medium. It's also a tough time for small businesses, which are seeing their profits squeezed by the downturn, while knowing full well that there has never been a more important time to shout louder than others in their field. Given these circumstances it might seem like a very frightening time to commit precious promotional budget to a struggling medium. But there are alternatives, and now is a great time to explore them. A service such as Signposter.com, an online service helping UK businesses buy and manage outdoor advertising, offers a viable, effective, low-cost and risk-free way to build up promotional collateral free from any potential surrounding editorial negativity. There is no denying that local press has a role to play in the promotional mix for small businesses. It's a proven way of reaching consumers in a local area. But now is surely the time for local businesses to do some research and be more adventurous, and gain stand-out by doing so. Outdoor advertising is now within the reach of small business managers.
Price and Prejudice
June 08, 2009
Some people think that price is everything. My son currently works in my company, SellerDeck, sitting beside me in the home office. His job is account managing customers who use our ecommerce web hosting. It’s very instructive listening in. We’re not the cheapest offering, although we believe that we offer good value. Since you will start losing orders and customers the second your ecommerce web site goes down, and Google research suggests that marginally slow sites reduce orders by 20%, you would expect quality of service to be the major topic of conversation. Often it is, but for a minority, price is all that matters. In fact, there are relatively few products and services where price should be the sole criterion. These probably include electricity, where the same stuff always comes down the same wire anyway, and petrol, where rival brands across town often sell petrol from the same refinery. But some people always focus on price. The question is; do you even want to speak to customers who only care about price? Wouldn’t these customers be better hassling the competition? They not only pay less, they can also waste a lot of time. Competing on price requires the lowest possible cost base. So most businesses try to compete on overall value. My suggestion is if you aren’t losing a few customers on price, you probably aren’t charging enough. And those customers that you would lose from slightly higher prices, will probably be the very same ones that would be the least profitable and the most trouble.
You are selling a product, not a lifestyle. Got it?
April 16, 2009
I can still remember the profound disappointment I felt when I realised as a teenager in the early 1980s that a Harrington jacket teamed with burgundy Sta Prest trousers did not actually make me cool. I even feel it now, when I pore over beautifully styled but thoroughly expensive Rapha cycle clothing that I know will not make me pedal faster. It will only make me the most expensively-dressed slow cyclist in south London. “We’re selling a lifestyle” is the kind of vague promise that gives marketing and sales a bad name. It leads to confused USPs, distorted evidence, too much focus on branding at the expense of practical product development and – ultimately – dissatisfied customers. Yet marketers still go to enormous lengths to persuade us that their product will somehow transform our ordinary lives into something fantastic. They forget that it is salespeople who actually have to deal with the queries and objections, the reluctance to buy, the disappointment that arises when goods don’t make us happier/wealthier/better-looking – or in my case, cooler. The sales section of the Marketing Donut, which launches on 20 April, is for the salespeople. It deals with the grit behind the marketing glamour, the techniques that convert interest into hard cash. I’m talking about the ins and outs of negotiation, cold-calling, chasing prospects, keeping databases up to date, giving presentations to executives who think they’ve seen it all, managing sales teams and distributors, and so on. We’re trying to keep it realistic, practical and, above all, useful, and we’re being helped in the task by some very knowledgeable experts, who share our view that selling is a discipline. These include Grant Leboff, principal of the Intelligent Sales Club who challenges conventional sales wisdom, Ian Cochrane of Gazing Performance, who specialises in getting sales teams to deliver under pressure, and Bryan McCrae, director of Cognitive Sales Consulting, who has helped dozens of firms improve their sales results. We’re not selling a lifestyle. We’re not selling anything at all, in fact, because all of this information is completely free. No strings, no add-ons, no hidden extras - just exactly what it says on the tin.
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