Tag: Sales

5 Common Marketing Mistakes

On By Joe DeRosaIn MarketingLeave a comment

mistakes

Sales are down…it’s Marketing’s fault. We’ve got a new product to launch…call Marketing. Which trade shows should should we be attending?…ask Marketing. These leads are garbage…talk to Marketing. I need more brochures…you know…call Marketing.

Many companies still don’t get Marketing. Leaders within those organizations believe that they can “will” their growth by rolling up their sales sleeves and making more calls. They have failed to recognize how the buying process has changed. The buyers terrain has become more difficult to maneuver across, as the volume of information –  compliments of the internet –  has created a landslide of material.  Some useful, some not.

As a half-hearted act of understanding the role of Marketing, some businesses have taken the step to create a Marketing department. Unfortunately this effort lacks commitment and results in a “one-foot-in, one-foot-out” mentality. Companies that try to tip-toe into Marketing experience many failures. The 5 common mistakes include:

1. Bad hires. Not wanting to fully commit, a company will bring in a very junior marketer who may in fact have experience with only one or two areas of marketing. As a result, instead of getting a marketing leader, the company ends up with someone who knows how to write copy, or send emails, or coordinate trade shows. Taking the cheap way out relative to talent will limit positive results in many cases.  When results do not match expectations the leader chalks it up to “Marketing mumbo-jumbo”.
2. Sales directing Marketing’s activities. Sales-driven cultures can negatively impact a new marketing organization’s success. If Sales dictates the marketing needs of the company you could be in for rough waters. Marketing and Sales should work together to develop a growth plan for the business. Marketing should focus on creating engagements with the target audience that result in lead generation, and Sales should focus on closing those leads.
3. Poor resource allocation. Many companies prefer to allocate their dollars on tangible efforts. A new logo, new sales collateral, or trade show booths. However, if the company’s brand hasn’t been defined or developed, the dollars spent in those other areas will be wasted. A successful Marketing team will provide the focus and discipline required to wrestle with the tougher, more difficult issues, like those having to do with the company’s brand, value proposition, and identity.  Budgeting and allocating dollars to these initiatives, as well as, those to gather market insights, complete a SWOT analysis and research case studies are critical to building the company’s brand leading to growth.
4. Low, or no, focus on content development. Today we know that an average buyer consumes 5 – 7 pieces of content before making a decision. Once the content is consumed, the buyer has moved through 40 – 70% of the buying process. Therefore, content is king. In the absence of high-quality, fresh content, the prospective buyer will go elsewhere to find what they need potentially eliminating  your business from consideration. When developing content, think broadly, and remember, great content is about the value it brings to the consumer of the content, not about how great it makes you look.
5. No Marketing dashboard. Marketing can absolutely show an ROI. By setting up and maintaining a marketing dashboard a business can monitor and measure key metrics to determine exactly how Marketing is impacting the business. How many leads per month, how many convert to appointments, how many sold, and the length of time it takes to close a sale are all key metrics a business should monitor. Having this level of insight will provide greater credibility and validation to the value the Marketing organization is delivering to the business.

The 7 Question Marketing Effectiveness Quiz

On By Joe DeRosaIn MarketingLeave a comment

Marketing

Whether a start-up or mature, large or small, restaurant or manufacturer, Marketing plays a vital role in the success of every business.  And while specific tactics may look different depending on your product or service, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the return on your marketing investment.  Setting up a Marketing dashboard is critical to providing you with this insight.  To get started you will need to have a thorough understanding of your business, your customers, competition, overall marketplace economics and trends.  Getting started requires time, focus, commitment and most importantly a complete acceptance of reality.   Take the 7 Question Marketing Effectiveness Quiz below to see how informed and prepared you are to lead your team to victory.

  1. Do you have a written definition of what a lead is?  Many companies have no clear definition of a lead.  In many cases a name alone represents a lead.  Marketing may generate a name and provide it to the Sales organization to contact leading to a false sense of demand creation.  A name is NOT a lead.  However, YOU need to decide what a lead is for your company and obtain the agreement to that definition from others on the executive team most importantly the leader of the Sales team.
  2. How many channels are you working to generate leads?  Is it just a sales team?  Do you use your website?  What about strategic partnerships?  A multi-channel marketing strategy provides greater possibilities to expanding your company’s reach and distribution.  Additionally you will find that certain channels present higher close ratios or stronger average sales prices.  While managing multiple channels requires resources, and subject matter expertise, you will find this approach yields better results as opposed to a single channel approach.
  3. What is your ROL by channel?  Do you know what your return-on-leads are by channel?  For example, you have a direct sales force, a website, and a strong accountant referral channel.  Each day, week, month, you generate leads through all 3 of these channels.  What are the close ratios per channel?  What is the average selling price of your product by channel?  What channel coverts the highest rate of leads to presentations, and how many of those presentations result in a sale?  Having insight into your ROL will help you focus on making the improvements necessary to grow your business.
  4. Does your website have lead-conversion capabilities?  Is your website static or dynamic?  Is it set up using responsive web design (RWD)? Do you have a mechanism in place to track the incoming visitors to your site and follow-up with the appropriate messaging and content?
  5. How much content do you have on your site and how fresh is it?  Do you have a content management strategy?  Do you provide free content to those that visit your site?  How do you decide what content to produce?  Who writes it?  How often is it refreshed?  What do you do with the feedback you get from prospects or customers that download your content?
  6. Do you have a blog?  Many businesses feel they don’t need to blog because their product or service is in a class of its own and doesn’t require blogging.  That’s simply not true.  Every company can and should blog.  There are always topics relevant to your potential buyers for you to be blogging about.  Whether you sell party supplies, automotive repair, or chimney cleaning, your target market is looking for content.  Blogs are a great way to increase your internet search results and get you found faster.
  7. Who is responsible for Marketing?  If you can’t answer this questions with a name, find one quickly…even if it’s you.  Think of it this way…if you pay the bills for your business and keep your own books, you may not have the title of CFO but you know who’s responsible for the finances of your business.  Likewise, if you’re the one doing the marketing, you’re the one responsible for the growth of your business too.  Someone has to be accountable for Marketing otherwise it simply will not get done.

Your answers to these questions provide the insight necessary to begin to develop your marketing dashboard.  Let me know if this was helpful.

3 Philosophies of a Great Company

On By Joe DeRosaIn BusinessLeave a comment

Greatness-vs.-Mediocrity

You work for a great company, right?  You know what your customers want.  Your product, your service, your company has got it.  You’re the best out there and you know it.  You’ve built things from the ground up or possibly revamped an existing infrastructure to improve your sales effectiveness and efficiency.  You installed a sales CRM tool, you’re looking at a marketing automation system, and you just bought a prospect list that will help you focus on where to fish.  You’re ready.  You’re set…and off you go!

But wait.  You’ve spent months focused only on the internal aspects of your company.  You’ve developed plans based upon a certain set of assumptions, all of which, are best guesses based upon what you know.  But herein lies the problem, it’s not what you know that presents the risk of failure…it’s what you don’t know.  And  right now you’re missing the biggest piece of your success equation – what does the customer want and how do they want it?

Most companies still operate from an inside-out viewpoint.  What do we sell?  Why are we the best?  What makes us different?  Why is our product or process better?  This is why we’re special.  This is why you’ll love our solution.  And on, and on it goes.

So what separates average companies from star performers?  While there are many things that go into creating a great company I’d offer the following three philosophies as perhaps the most critical:

  1. Outside-in view.   Placing the buyers needs first is crucial to a company’s growth and success.  This requires dedicating time and resources to studying and understanding your prospective buyer.   Sirius Decisions, an expert in the integration of sales and marketing, developed a proven process that companies can use to identify and define their various buyer personas.  These personas provide deep insight into the buyer, who they are, how they operate, where they go to gather information, and their preferred methods of absorbing information.  Without this deep understanding of your prospective buyer, your sales and marketing efforts will continue to produce disappointing results.
  2. Thirst for knowledge.  Great companies are also learning companies.  They apply different techniques to deepen their awareness and familiarity of the marketplace.  Leadership gurus like Noel Tichy have introduced various methods for gaining and using this knowledge, inside of large organizations, that can also be applied to small businesses.  Tichy’s Virtuous Teaching Cycle, introduced in his book The Leadership Cycle, provides clear steps for how to gather, assimilate, and cascade knowledge throughout an organization.  Companies that commit to this quest for knowledge are better prepared to take the lead when the opportunity arises.
  3. Commitment to talent.  It’s no wonder that the companies on the list of Fortune’s Great Places to Work have some of the strongest performance results around.  For years, we have read the studies and seen the data that prove a direct correlation between employee satisfaction and high performance.  Today, we see companies like HubSpot, Zappos, and Square2Marketing providing benefits to employees ranging from “unlimited vacation time” to “pet friendly work places”.  Companies are beginning to see the benefits of providing more control and accountability to their employees.  Brian Halligan, HubSpot’s CEO said, “we hire very smart people who focus on the growth of our company and we expect them to use common sense”, and they have done just that since this HubSpot’s unlimited vacation policy was introduced in January 2010.

The anatomy of a great Sales presentation

On By Joe DeRosaIn SalesLeave a comment

Over the years I’ve read hundreds of sales books.  I’ve attended countless sales training sessions with various philosophies from Spin Selling to Solution Selling, and Relationship Selling.  As I’ve sat through these courses as both a rep and ultimately as the head of Sales I began to watch expressions and reactions to the material being presented.  I have seen the excitement, and the hunger, in people’s eyes as they listened intently with the hope that “this will be the training that changes everything” for them, and that “this class will provide the silver bullet” that has eluded them throughout their career.   Most often times they’re wrong.

A recent article on training cited a statistic that 87% of sales training was forgotten within the first 30 days.  This begs the question, why?  Is it because the philosophies being taught are not good?  Are the different sales processes wrong?  Is it just bad information?  Is it because the rep tried it and it didn’t work?  I would offer that all of these sales methodologies have great aspects to them. They all offer tremendous insights and perspectives on various sales situations.  But there’s no such thing as one-size fits all when it comes to Sales training.  Why?  Because all people are different and as such react in different ways when they are being sold to.  That means it’s incumbent on the sales rep to be savvy enough to know what elements to apply in any given situation.

No Sales training methodology will work 100% every time.  The key is knowing what pieces to take from each perspective and incorporate them into your own style and process.  The best sales people know what to say, when to say it, when not to say anything, what questions to ask, how to ask them, and when to ask.

Recently I participated in a discussion on “What makes a great Sales Presentation?”  Some of the responses were very classroom-ish.  The fact is, the more complex you make something the less likely it will be tried, let alone followed.  As such I put together my own step-by-step recommendation for delivering consistent, high-quality sales presentations.

To get the most out of every Sales presentation follow the steps below:

1. Prepare – know the buyer persona you will be meeting with, your competition, your own products and services.

2. Be early. If you’re on time you’re late.

3. Dress the part. I can’t tell you how many sales presentations I’ve sat through where the reps tie was not straight or a blouse had one too many buttons undone. Attention to the small details says a lot about you.

4.SMILE – no one wants to spend time with a grouch or scary person!

5. Listen twice as much as you talk – that’s why we have 2 ears and one mouth.

6. If your product requires a formal presentation use an iPad and get theSlideshark app. It is a powerful tool and demonstrates your ability to “integrate” various tools into a process…the sales process.

7. Boil your presentation down to 3 salient points…be clear and concise but have back-up and detail should the buyer want to dive deeper.

8. Gain continuous buy-in. Throughout your presentation make sure you check in with the buyer to gain their continued approval and agreement. When you get to the end you can sum up your presentation by saying, “we agree this solution makes sense for your business so lets talk about next steps”

9. No matter what the outcome, shake hands, smile, thank them for their time and let them know you will keep in touch…then do it!

Give this a try for a month, or however long it takes you to do no less than 25 presentations.  Then let me know what your results were.  Remember, to be successful in Sales you MUST be a continuous learner, broadening, and deepening your perspective each and every day with each and every presentation you give.  Not even the 9 steps above are a silver bullet but they can certainly help you improve  your overall sales effectiveness.

Like this if it helped.

Happy Selling!